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| Getting it wrong, mostly |
| Sarah Qezilbash / New Delhi Jun 01, 2009, 00:48 IST |
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What does a brand do in times of trouble? What roles can advertising and communication play in times such as these? Just advertise or use tools like PR to send out positive signals to the world? And does a bigger brand, and a bigger ad budget automatically guarantee success?
Brands Under Fire seeks to figure out just this, with a somewhat unique format. It takes four case studies of some of India’s top brands — Cadbury, Coke, Pepsi and UTI’s US 64 — and details the way they reacted when their brands were under fire. It then gets together various marketing and brand gurus and gets their view on what these four firms did right, and wrong, to see what lessons this holds for other brands that could suffer the same fate in the future.
Cadbury, to take the first example, got into trouble when worms were found in its chocolate by the food authorities. Cadbury, we learn to our horror, was aware of the problem and, in days, it moved from being a respected brand to being the worst joke around town — SMS jokes, cartoons, you name it, they all lampooned Cadbury. Unlike others about whom we’ll read in a minute, Cadbury now acted firmly. It strengthened the type of packaging, sent out letters from top-management, organised media conferences. Amitabh Bachchan, who was brought in to endorse the product, began by saying he was deeply sceptical until he actually saw the changes Cadbury had brought in. The exercise worked though, as the book points out, Cadbury was lucky. India had a weak legal system which allowed it to get away without the kind of punitive damages it would have had to pay in the West.
Pepsi and Coke, by contrast, acted quite differently when they were accused of selling products that had pesticide after the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) tested their products in its laboratory — both Pepsi and Coke, it was alleged, had levels of pesticides thirty times higher than the prescribed safe limits. Both companies followed similar strategies of denial. They conducted joint press conferences and were defensive. Coke tried to divert attention to the work it was doing in areas like health and education; Pepsi even ran cheeky TV commercials with Shah Rukh Khan, saying Pepsi was not really safe — not really safe from the greedy eyes of cola drinkers. They made much of the government report which said the drinks fell ‘well within’ India’s safety limits, and ignored the bit that said nine out of twelve soft drink samples produced by Coca-Cola and PepsiCo operators in India failed to meet European standards for pesticide residue. But if their sales didn’t suffer, does it really matter if the strategy didn’t look responsible?
In the UTI case, when US 64 collapsed, it was obvious the problem was a deep-seated one and had been ignored for a long time. What saved UTI was the government stepping in and provided a bailout package.
What’s critical is whether the companies even had a survival strategy. Should Pepsi and Coke, for instance, have withdrawn the distribution of the product until random tests were conducted? What comes out loud and clear, first and foremost, is that in each case, the signs of the catastrophe were ignored by companies for a very long time. Their response, except in the Cadbury case perhaps, failed to integrate adequate remedial action with effective communication.
A galaxy of advertising and communication specialists — Rama Bijapurkar, Mahnaz Curmally, Gerson da Cunha and Roger Pereira, among others — argue that in the case of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, the strategy left the consumer confused. These experts point out that these brands haven’t addressed the issue with the kind of seriousness that they ought to have. There is nothing, the authors of the book say, that the cola companies did in response to the crisis that would be worthy of imitating in a similar situation in the future. They neither took the accusations seriously, nor did they take the consumer into confidence.
Eventually, advertising and PR, no matter how good, cannot cut much ice with the consumer. It all boils down to the actions you take. In the case of the colas, as the authors put it, they talked faster than they walked. Companies, it is true, manage to win new customers, especially in an economy that is growing so fast; but you build brands to be able to retain customers, to avoid the large costs associated with getting new ones; a good brand strategy has to convince the customers it means well. The book is a must-read for brand professionals, to know what not to do when the next disaster strikes them.
BRANDS UNDER FIRE
Ivan Arthur & Kurien Mathews
Penguin India
214 pages; Rs 499
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