Tanishq Controversy - Some Lessons

For a minute lets forget the controversy and focus on the advertisement of Tanishq. It leaves you with a warm feeling, love, peace and a life that you wish were real. Unfortunately across the globe since at least 2 decades the public seem to get offended easily, see ghosts where there maybe none and since long an active effort to accept some ghosts while objecting to others. This has only exacerbated the matter leading to the Tanishq imbroglio – not the first and surely not the last.

That Tanishq decided to have this ad is their right and sections of the society objecting to it is their right. For anyone to start demanding a ban on a brand or company just because they did not like an ad is just plain stupid from a simple logic. Object, debate but not ban. The moment you reward bad behaviour – whoever it maybe, whoever was first – you justify and normalise it. After that it is a downhill drive all along. This demand is like rewarding bad behaviour.

Let’s also recall the outrage against Aamir Khan when he famously said in a conference that his wife (incidentally a Hindu) asked if they should move out of the country, as she feared for the safety of their children in a climate of insecurity. Aamir Khan is free to have his views and that is his birth right. Disagreeing with him is also birth right. But I was one in condemning him and generally supportive of the actions taken against him by the public.

When he made that statement, he was the Brand Ambassador of Incredible India, a marketing campaign of the Government of India globally and to put it mildly this was the most irresponsible statement any brand ambassador could make. If he wanted to air this view, he should have first resigned from his position, disassociated himself from the Incredible India campaign and air views on India. It is one thing to endorse a cheap soap or car and use a imported soap or car oneself but another to endorse a brand/organisation/country and speak against it even if you are doing it for the money.

The Tanishq ad was different and trying to create a sense of warmth and brotherhood of society and yet it attracted flak. Let us analyse this dispassionately.

No commercial organisation, brand has any business to grapple with the flaws in a society unless they have a long term plan, a strategy and think it through.

Any commercial ad campaign involving social reformation must be thought through to the last person, and the brand must be ready to face the “you don’t know what you don’t know” situations that it may throw up.

The brand must be ready with solutions, courage to stand up to their convictions and also know that they are now behaving like an NGO and NOT as a commercial organisation. There is a very clear divide between the two and any management that does not understand this needs to go back to school.

In these Covid times when most of us are “depressed” a brand decides to do something to create a feel good factor before Diwali and Eid, then the first lesson they should know is – AVOID Politics, Religion and other Racial subjects (PRR). It is impossible for any brand to use a PRR platform and hope to win even in normal times and globally we do not live in normal times.

Any advertisement campaign would be debated through the ad agency & Tanishq marketing team. Based on the messaging idea approved by the Brand, the ad agency would have created the copy involving several creative folks and shown it to the brand team.  That nobody even raised the red flag on this potential minefield either shows stupidity or if raised and ignored shows arrogance for not thinking it through.

I still recall more than 3 decades ago as a rookie salesman we had competing product brands as customers and when we had to have them together in official social occasions we spent a fortune in serving imported foreign brands so as not to offend any of the customers by not having their products served on the occasion.  This is just common sense. Team Tanishq failed on this fundamental lesson because there is competitive jingoism out there.

Some have said this controversy was anticipated by the brand and let it happen because it gave them a bigger bang for the buck. Apart from being unethical they were trying to create the exact opposite of what they wanted the brand to convey which is height of stupidity. If that is so, it speaks poorly of the management, but personally I would discount this rationale.

Others have spoken of how the advertisement and creative fraternity is generally leftist and this was the reason behind creating this concept. Popular perception since time immemorial bears one out on this perception. But the brand team is supposed to be rightist, money minded and the last thing on their mind should be social reformation. They could have opposed the concept or modified it. They did not.

One question popularly raised has been that the ad could have shown the reverse, and some have even asked the question whether “the protestors” would have outraged in that case. Silly question because somebody else would be “hurt” and they would outrage, not the same set of people. To  imply that only ONE set of people outrage thus is EXACTLY the reason why this outrage industry has grown to monstrous proportions.

As an aside I again repeat, perceptions are not facts, but unfortunately often they end up as facts. Without stepping into a minefield on the subject because that is NOT the purpose of this blog, it was hardly less than a year ago when a young member of parliament from Trinamool Congress Nusrat Jahan was castigated aggressively for wearing a bindi to Parliament even though she belonged to a political party that is well known for its views. The public do not forget easily, social media does not let them forget and the silence – rewarding bad behaviour – was shockingly loud.

While we will never know what happened, why, how etc in this sordid episode it has some lessons and ideas.

• No commercial organisation and brand must factor in social reformation in their campaign – it must be money, brand value, brand positioning – nothing else.
• No commercial organisation and brand must even consider any PRR related campaigns unless it endorses popular mood across different opinion groups and is momentary.
• Any campaign with PRR elements must be planned for the next decade or more and design it in a humorous manner like the AMUL billboards so that somewhere along the way customers accepts your messages without being offended.  
• Tanishq should have stuck to one side of any story and run with it. Focus on Diwali, Eid, Xmas, Hanukkah, Gurupurab whatever based on your client base, local population etc and do not mix them up. 
• Tanishq could have combined two ads in one so to speak where they show 2 different faiths intermingling. If I were the brand head and had decided that social reformation was one of my targets, I would have shown 2 households simultaneously. Each the converse of the other but both conveying the same message.

When the target is to promote brand Tanishq and NOTHING more – link it to gifting, wearing Tanishq products for the occasion and NOT attract focus on different faiths being depicted. The focus should have been the brand, the product, and the rest incidental to the situation.

Finally if Tanishq had conviction in what they were doing, they should have stood firm and not apologised. Instead they should have said this ad was just the first one in a long campaign and they would request the public to wait for the other ads to be aired over the next month and then judge. This means that this would have been a campaign story over the next few months showing various permutations and combinations of inter faith relationships.  

Even if Tanishq had not planned any further similar ads, they should have planned them immediately and taken control over the narrative which would have given them far more brand goodwill. But if they had not made any such plans – they deserve to face the heat however irrational one may say it is.

There may be other ideas, lessons but honestly most are not wisdom by hindsight but just plain common sense and being aware of the world around us.