Dabur, Fabindia Ad Controversies: What Brands Must Know About Outrage
Brands cannot continue to be naïve in assessing what their degrees of freedom are, writes branding guru Santosh Desai.
The air has been thick with advertising controversies. First, there was Fabindia and now there is Dabur, both of whom have had to backtrack after releasing their campaigns. Last year, it was Tanishq’s turn to face the heat, and it seems that this is a pattern that will recur.
At one level, it is natural for consumers to react now that they have the means to do so. Social media arms the hitherto voiceless with an instrument that is both highly accessible and fearfully potent. Anything in the public domain, be it an ad, a speech, a tweet, or a cricket performance is fair game. If something offends a section of the audience, then the reaction is swift and merciless.
However, the outrage generated by these campaigns is not just about trampling on someone’s cultural sensitivities. It is part of a larger political process, which is focused on patrolling the boundaries of what is seen as appropriate behaviour. Anything deemed to be an attack on Hindu sentiments, no matter how indirect, is fiercely reacted to.
Given the fact that this is a section that has numbers on its side, is not afraid to act out its threats, and enjoys strong political backing makes it a formidable force that brands have to listen to.
On the brands’ side, the commercial logic for withdrawing in the face of such threats is straightforward.
The tragedy is that on the face of it, what brands are attempting to do should be unexceptionable. Using Urdu to describe a festival is not setting out to be an act of provocation. Attempting to broaden the definition of love by including other kinds of sexual orientation is not an action that seeks to divide people, quite the contrary. There are some campaigns that are deliberatively provocative, depending on a strategy of inflaming passions so as to garner attention quickly, but the ones in question do not fit that bill.
Fem's Karwa Chauth advertisement. (Image: The Quint)
The problem lies in the nature of the external context today, which has become so sensitive and politically polarised that brands, even when trying to act nobly, end up ruffling feathers. And given that, when it comes to the crunch, brands do not have the stomach to stand by their weakly-held convictions, they are doomed to take one step forward and scamper five steps back.
What is perplexing is why brands keep repeating this pattern. The one thing that brands should have learnt by now, is to identify those messages and creative renditions that are likely to run afoul of the self-appointed guardians of morality and ideology that exist in large numbers today.
Brands cannot continue to be naïve in assessing what their degrees of freedom are. It makes no sense to make brave statements of apparent belief and then to back down at the first sign of trouble.
The problem is aggravated by the current fascination that brands have with being portrayed with purpose. Brands are competing with each other to make ever-loftier claims about transforming humanity. The obsession with making a larger social comment, of embracing a cause has become a cliché. Worse it sets brands up in producing advertising that apart from being hollow, lacks distinctiveness and runs the added danger of evoking social media anger.
That is not to argue that brands cannot or shouldn’t stand for something inspiring or take a position on social or even political issues. By all means, if that is what the brand is truly driven by, and if that helps it connect better with its core audience, then it should not shy away from saying what it must. But if that is the case, then it needs to have the courage to stand its ground. The current half-hearted strategy of acting in naïve haste and retreating in cowering fear does a brand no favours whatsoever.
Screengrab of an older Byju's commercial. Image: Byju's/YouTube)
If brands were to stay the course and not retreat, in a majority of cases, they would incur no lasting damage. As it turns out, in most cases, the people outraging on social media are rarely the core consumers of the brands involved. Also, social media has a way of amplifying the sentiments of a small group of people so that they appear to be far more significant in number than they are.
The reality is what it is. The fact that audiences are more politically mobilised is something that brands have to acknowledge and understand. Marketing today does not operate in a vacuum, culture and politics are an intrinsic part of every brand’s operating context. People who decide on any public-facing communication have to be fully cognisant of the new realities of the day. Brands that do not have either the belief or the capability to defend their beliefs should avoid venturing tentatively into a politically charged space. For when they retreat as hastily as they do in the face of the slightest pushback, they end up strengthening the arms of the trolls, who become even more emboldened the next time around.
Santosh Desai is a leading brand consultant, social commentator, and author. He writes regularly on contemporary Indian society and on subjects related to marketing.
The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.