The $410M cost of misinformation for Coca-Cola: Rethinking reputation in a post-truth world

by Danny Franklin and Jessica Reis

By many measures, Coca-Cola has had a rough 2025. A Threads post from February 8 accused the beverage giant of turning in undocumented workers to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying “Coca-Cola is reporting its own latin workers to ICE! BOYCOTT COCA-COLA!” The story quickly spread to other platforms, with the top 20 Coke-related TikTok posts gaining nearly 15 million views. As it grew, Reuters deployed its reporters to conduct a fact check (importantly, only seen by a few thousand readers); Coca-Cola issued statements in Spanish and English attempting to correct the record. But the damage was done. Coca Cola CEO James Quincey on a quarterly earnings call blamed the false story, in part, for a $410 million drop in sales.

Coca-Cola suffered from a piece of bad information online. Bad information — in the form of false misinfo and disinfo like this, but also in the form of true negative stories — hits consumers’ feeds all the time, spreading exponentially farther and faster than the efforts enlisted to correct it. Sometimes, people give a brand the benefit of the doubt and keep scrolling. But sometimes, they believe the worst, allowing bad stories to take root and create a drag on reputation that affects the bottom line for months or even years.

Brands invest heavily in measuring and protecting their reputations to defend themselves. But the release last week of the Axios Harris Poll 100 reputation ranking shows the limits of traditional thinking about measuring reputation. In the Axios Harris 100 reputation ranking — Coca-Cola has an enviable position as the 25th strongest company, up 2 spots from last year, and a full 17 spots ahead of Pepsi. Yet if that is true, how could Coke be hurt so badly by demonstrably false information?

There’s a better way to measure reputation. The Axios Harris Poll 100 gets a lot of things right — but its approach misses hidden vulnerabilities because it doesn’t pressure-test reputations against the likeliest threats they may face. It’s a lesson any boxing fan knows: you can’t tell if a fighter has a glass jaw until you see them take a punch.

To measure what matters in a reputation, we battle-tested over 170 brands across the US and Europe. For each, we explored how believable — and how harmful — a series of common negative narratives were on the brand. The result was a Resilience Index that gives a forward-looking view of which companies are best prepared to fend off negative news, both true and false, due to the specifics of their brand reputation.

And while Coca-Cola may be the company with the 25th strongest reputation according to the Axios Harris Poll 100 — our research showed underlying vulnerabilities. On average, 73% of consumers believed the most-damaging hypotheticals to be true about Coca-Cola — whereas only an average 57% believed the same ones to be true of Pepsi. And whereas Coca-Cola has a 17-spot edge over Pepsi in the Axios Harris ranking, we found Pepsi to be a more resilient brand in the face of bad information. Take for example: there’s been little online conversation about the Federal Trade Commission’s allegations of price discrimination against Pepsi, suggesting a stronger reputation that allows consumers to give Pepsi the benefit of the doubt, thus a more resilient brand.

How can a brand be sure it’s taking the right steps to protect its reputation? It starts with understanding what a reputation is for. To measure resilience, you need to test, as authentically as possible, the scenarios that will put a brand’s reputation at risk. Only then can you see the vulnerabilities that lie beneath rosy reputation metrics and target communication efforts to shore them up ahead of an attack.

Brands are trying to drive their story through a post-truth media environment in which anyone can say virtually anything and most people will believe it. But brands are not helpless. By exploring and investing in what makes a brand resilient, communicators can better withstand the blows that come, and break through with the story they want to tell.