Crises of Faith at the Brand Wallahs' Ball

Crises of Faith at the Brand Wallahs' Ball


Brand Wallahs (BWs), meaning the Advertising fraternity, their Public Relations sub-set, and the Marketing mavens that use them, believe they give the kiss of life to a product. Without them, they affirm, the product, the service, the star, the politician, etc… would be faceless, an unfocussed blur minus that all important image. No brand image means being colourless, lacklustre, lost in the crowd, déclassé, quite irrespective of those intrinsic merits they may well feel they have.

The BWs believe they are saviours when crises come crashing down upon a product or company; on a man and his reputation; on a promise gone wrong. They believe that things come right more easily, redemption, even forgiveness is possible, all obstacles overcome; provided the brand image has been built strong and positive in the first place.

Brands Under Fire, an advertising and marketing celebration recently put to market is written by Ivan Arthur & Kurien Mathews and published by Penguin India. It is a lucid account of brand faith and looks at three sticky case studies published under the aegis of The Subhas Ghosal Foundation, named after the Thompson advertising legend, and the Walter Saldanha of Leo Burnett India founded AICAR Business School.

The book reprises three notorious calamities in the workaday placid worlds of Cadbury chocolates, Pepsi & Coke's world dominating fizzy pop, and the kalash logo-bearing Unit Trust of India.

As cure, every single wave of phosphorescent logic from a collection of 13 advertising and marketing gurus crashes down again and again on a conceptual rock called “Trust”.

It is “Trust” that is the adhesive between the company or institution and its consumer. And if this fragile, rather virginal entity is betrayed, then the “Brand” takes an incalculable hit. The only way forward is to restore that trust using multiple tools including good leadership, advertising, public relations, and swift reparations, if not full-fledged restitution.

All of this also applies, of course, to non-company entities desirous of maintaining a brand image, be they cine-jagat's (Peter Pan) Sharukh Khan; The (murderous) Taliban; The (dissolving) State of Pakistan; the (weak) Republic of India; or even Mr.(fraud of all fraudulent frauds) Raju of Satyam!

A brand, like rape, is defined severally by the conclave of BWs. Shekhar Swamy of RK SWAMY BBDO/HANSA calls it a “promise or a pact between manufacturer and buyer assuring (a) product authenticity and (b) product consistency between places over time.”

But the case histories, now dwarfed by subsequent atrocities perpetrated by an accelerating post-modern existence, read, like Rajiv Gandhi's dinky Rs. 60 crore Bofors Scandal, like misdemeanours in B&W (Black and White). That they could still destroy lives and kill innocent children is somehow incidental.

In the first story, Cadbury is seen to have sat on its hands despite prior knowledge of their extensive “worms infestation” problem owing to inadequately packed and badly stored chocolates. The “thoughtless worms struck,” as a tongue-in-cheek Gerson da Cunha puts it, when the infestation received the adverse attentions of the Indian Food and Drink Administration (FDA) and a raucous media. But once placed with its feet to the fire, Cadbury did, of course, rescue the situation by promptly changing its packaging to mimic rival Amul, sitting pretty in a state of unseemly grace. They also brought in Amitabh Bachchan for a baritone restoration job.

Some of the commentary tellingly ponders India’s interminably slow and “weak legal system” that enables entities like Cadbury and Union Carbide to get away lightly without the massive punitive damages they would have had to pay in the West. Verily, Mr. Raju and the now Japanese owners of Ranbaxy have more to fear from The US Legal System than our timeless, toothless, feckless, desi one.

In the Pepsi and Coke case study, the kissa is about pesticides in the drink to a strength of 30 times the permissible limits. The whistle-blower is a New Delhi based NGO, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). But ignoring the possibility that some of their multiple bottling plants might indeed be using contaminated ground water, not to mention the occasional condom and large libations of, it is reported, dirt; both companies chose to conduct independent tests on their colas and broadsided their predictably blameless findings in a robust advertising campaign.

They also pitched in film-star brand power via Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. Other back channel efforts yielded a remarkable clean chit from the government of the day and aspersions cast on the motives of CSE. The consumers, like forgiving wives of philandering husbands, also chose to be duly convinced.

And why ever not? After all even our treated tap-water is unsafe. Ergo Coke, Pepsi, plus nine other brands of cola and bottled- water cited by the CSE study; were, “safe by local standards”.

Sunita Narayan, Head of CSE, prominent in water management issues, routinely invokes the big picture of a “failure of government institutions to take the issue of public health seriously,” and concludes, a little helplessly, if accurately, that we, “care little for standards in India”.

The final case study is about the collapse and resurrection of Unit 64 albeit as a bland bond fund from a once kalashful of equity one. This was India’s first, indeed its only mutual fund, by monopolistic dictat, for decades. Set up by the socialist Government of India in 1964, it gave its millions of small investors reliable tax free returns ranging from 6 to 23 per cent per annum for many years.

In 2001 came the deluge. The fund’s net worth was largely eroded and it had to temporarily halt trading. A new Chairman, M.Damodaran, later to preside over SEBI's erstwhile glory days, came in to revitalise UTI. Damodaran’s rescue of Unit 64 and the “vibrancy” he imparted to proceedings does make for an inspirational template in 2009.

Damodaran smoothly termed the US-64 problem as a “liquidity issue rather than a solvency one,” and the Government of India promptly coughed up the liquidity. Effectively, the Government nationalised Unit-64, taking over its "burnt" assets, reaping huge profits from the self same equity holdings over time.

For the 20 million or more "betrayed" unit holders it has not gone quite so well. But, even they, ignorant of the ways of equity, did get their money back with a modest return on investment.

(1,050 words)

Tuesday, 3rd March, 2009
Gautam Mukherjee