Keeping purpose-driven marketing safe from boycott campaigns

Authored by By Amrit Malik Associate Account Manager at Evoc Communications Consulting. 

Back in 2010 when social media was still in its infancy, popular fashion retailer GAP learnt a bitter lesson about the power and influence that social media users hold over popular brands’ narratives. Barely six days after GAP unveiled its redesigned logo as part of a brand refresh exercise that allegedly cost $100 million, the brand was forced to go back to the older one after social media backlash that was both swift and brutal. 

The Guardian reported there were more than 2,000 comments on Facebook criticising the decision to ditch the well-known logo. A Twitter account set up in protest collected thousands of followers and a "Make your own Gap logo" site went viral on the Internet, prompting nearly 14,000 parody versions.  

Twelve years later, we can confirm that brands, like human beings, are poor students of history. The 2010 Gapgate controversy, as it became known, was just a precursor to possibly hundreds of cases in later years where brands have been forced to apologise and make quick amends after their latest campaigns faced the ire of angry social media mobs.

While the phenomenon of online backlash against brands is fairly universal, we in India are seeing a far more extreme and virulent version of the same. One very latest example of this is Bharat Matrimony’s Holi campaign which lead to a lot of backlash, with one user asking them to take down the ad or face a campaign by Hindus as #boycottbharatmatrimony. 

This comes on the heels of another Holi ad that received severe criticism and was taken down. Food delivery unicorn Swiggy came under fire recently for a billboard that stated the correct usage of an egg is for an omelette and sunny side-up and not on someone’s head. It had also used the hashtag ‘bura mat khelo’, a play on ‘bura mat maano, Holi hai’. The food delivery platform took down the billboard as #HinduPhobicSwiggy trended on social media.

Here, online protests against brands frequently degenerate into calls for boycotts, or even transcend into offline vandalism - Tata’s jewellery brand Tanishq’s store in Gujarat was ransacked in 2020 after a campaign film showed an interfaith couple went viral on Twitter and earned angry reactions. 

There’s another important point of distinction. Indian social media users have overwhelmingly directed the angriest protests against campaigns that appear to ruffle their sensibilities about their religious or ethnic pride. Last year, clothing retailer Fabindia had to rename its collection titled ‘Jashn-e-Riwaaz’, an Urdu term, after it was deemed offensive to ‘Hinduism’ by some Hindu groups. Tanishq, no stranger to courting social media troubles for its campaigns, had to apologise and withdraw another ad that purported to promote a fire-cracker free Diwali.   

These and countless other incidents point to the unsaid dilemma faced by popular brands and their owners or managers when planning a new, clutter-breaking campaign: just how bold and iconoclastic can they afford to be before they are judged as having gone too far?

The answer appears to vary on where the brand aims to run its campaign. The western conservatives are as easily ruffled as their Indian counterparts, but what makes India a particularly challenging place to risk pushing the envelope too far is the virulent nature of protests and boycott calls, that can even erupt into open calls and threats to life and property of a brand’s employees. 

Milder forms of backlash still cause financial harm - Dabur’s share price reportedly fell 1.51% after the brand was forced to withdraw an ad showing a same-sex couple celebrating Karvachauth. Titan’s stock too dropped within a day by 2.5% after the Tanishq ad controversy, The New Indian Express reported. 

This dilemma is particularly ironic given the frequent calls for brands to be purpose-driven, or in simpler words, engage in brand activism. Identifying and aligning strongly and visibly to a purpose are no doubt the driving factors behind many of these campaigns as is seen in the accompanying press quotes at the time of launch. Having to abandon the campaign entirely and distancing from the stated purpose, exercises that easily devour several crores of rupees in their making and end up costing brands much more than just a sheepish apology.

The resolution of this dilemma is not easy, but attempts must be made to find some feasible answers. One way to deal with extreme protests is to simply stand up to the backlash, as ethnic wear brand Manyavar-Mohey demonstrated two years ago, when its campaign sought to give a gender-neutral spin to the Indian tradition of “Kanyadaan'' and promptly generated a maelstrom of negative reactions and calls for boycott.

Of course, not all brand owners will have the gumption and chutzpah to take on online mobs and stand their ground. The first trick for brand owners then is to introspect and decide just how willing they are to stand behind a campaign while it is still at the planning stage, should things snowball and end up in a boycott campaign. This is a critical consideration while deciding on a campaign touching a topic that is incendiary by nature, Anything related to religious traditions is thin ice to step on.  

Even for brands willing to push the envelope or considering what they believe are safer topics or themes, a thorough scenario planning exercise of all possible reactions is recommended. Military and corporate strategists have for long used scenario planning as a powerful tool to lay out all possible actions and their outcomes, so that there are no nasty surprises at the end. It is high time brand strategists adopted this tool too.

Launching a progressive and pathbreaking campaign only to withdraw it within days, and even apologise for having launched it, costs brands much more than just money. The damage to the brand’s image and reputation is long lasting, the negative press lives permanently on the Internet. Worse still, these U-turns tend to often spur even the progressives into leading a second round of backlash over what they consider to be a desperate cave in.

Thirteen years after the Gapgate, planning and running iconoclastic brand campaigns has only grown far more challenging and risky. Many brands will decide to play it safe and stick to anodyne themes and topics, but those bold and daring enough to experiment must take extra caution and be prepared.