Brand Tarnishing, the Tanishq Way!

Why did Tanishq’s recent ad stir up a hornets' nest among India’s general public? More importantly, what can we all learn about advertising and brand management from this colossal Titan fiasco?

Right away, one thing that a vast majority of us can agree on here is that we are not talking about a well conceived or a well executed ad!

Way too syrupy for its own good, and that too unnecessarily wading into highly sensitive fault lines that exist in the Indian society. To add insult to injury, neither is this misadventure providing any additional elucidation about the brand’s inherent values, explicit benefits or it’s positioning in the market, that can compensate for the wanton risks being taken.

Yeah, you stand for Hindu Muslim unity in this country! Point taken! But is there any brand out there that will come out and say the opposite, you think?

OK, but still, is the ad so bad that it has to be immediately withdrawn and people still not satisfied are talking about boycotting Tanishq and everything. After all, Indians are not new to bad ads, at all, right? In fact, we’ve been on a staple diet of these right from our Doordarshan days, and are so good at this, that we reward the most syrupy and corny of them, by humming their jingles all the time. Remember washing powder, Nirma?

So yes, the larger question still remains as to why Tanishq is facing a backlash that not just seems so out of proportion to the error they have committed, but also, so out of sync with the harmonious communal atmosphere that we know to be prevailing in India.

The answer has two separate components to it!

One component that has always been there, ever since men started listening to messages and forming opinions about them and another that is quite new to the social media era that we live in these days.

1.      Magnification of a message’s error due to the inherent limitations of our brain.

The first human reaction to any emotionally charged message is a visceral one. An equally strong tit-for-tat emotional response that is driven by the limbic system of our brain, that only tells us whether we like the message or not.

Then as we go on wondering ‘why’ the like or the dislike and slowly our rational part of the brain, the Pre Frontal Cortex (PFC) starts getting into the fray. And that is precisely where our challenges begin.

PFC is the region of the brain that plans complex cognitive behavior, personality expression, decision making, moderating social behavior, and moderating certain aspects of speech and language.

Obviously the PFC of an average person on the street in India, is not the same as that of Shashi Tharoor or Chetan Bhagat, the so called intelligentsia who is suddenly up in arms, and crying crocodile tears in the name of downfall of communal harmony in India, without really understanding the merits of the issue at hand.

When I watch the ad, I am clearly annoyed at the way the Hindu girl is sheepishly behaving with her mother in law, as if the Muslim family has done something truly out of the ordinary.

My lived experience in India is that among the urbane elite, this kind of harmonious behavior is the norm, and doesn’t even deserve a mention in passing, forget the huge ‘overacting muscles’ that are being flexed here for selling jewelry.

What is shown here is something so casual that, Muslims will do it. Hindus will also do it.

Hindus more so, because they don’t even believe in the ‘sacrosanct word of God’ that theirs is the only true path, and all others have to be ‘saved’ and converted into their path and so on and so forth.

But in Tanishq’s defense, when it’s ad shows a Muslim family doing it, it is not saying that Hindu families will not do it.

I am easily able to reach such a logical deduction, just like how our friends Chetan and Shashi are! But a lot of the average folks in India may not be able to establish such a clear logical affirmation, especially when the first time they are hearing about this ad, is after it has become a major political controversy, and a lot of ‘like-minded’ people have already, publicly staked a firm stand against it.

So when they go on to analyze as to why they ‘dislike’ the ad, their PFC will take the lazy way out and short circuit to a highly visceral response, and words like Love Jihad and all starts squeezing in.

Any person who has ever heard the word Love Jihad, knows that it doesn’t stand for Muslim boys marrying Hindu girls and looking after them like the apple of their eye, as this ad is showing.

Rather Love Jihad is all about using love as a political tool for religious conversion where betrayal is the tactic used and the larger strategy is all about political gains, which this ad is not showing.  

2.      Magnification of a message’s error due to the sheer volume of people whose dissident voices matter.

In the pre-social media era, an error made by a brand like the one mentioned above wouldn’t have mattered in the larger scheme of things. People who like the ad, may consider buying the product and people who don’t, just keep singing jingles as they move on with their life.

But today the response of the vast majority of the people matter, and not just that of the target audience. And it is immaterial whether their actual response is objectively right or wrong, as per any externally applied yardstick whatsoever.

Titan knows this better today, than anyone else and I think that is a good thing.

Clearly they were fishing in troubled waters through this ad, by associating themselves to values like communal harmony, which may already be a thing among their target audience, but is still an aspirational value and a work in progress, for the common man.

Doesn’t what the people on the street, who may never walk into a Titan store to buy luxury jewelry, think matter?

Of course, it does! For better or for worse!

So wouldn’t it be vastly better if Titan can act in ways that builds our communal harmony and makes it rock solid, before they think of prematurely selling it to make profits for themselves.

Yes, let’s all give our prime focus to making our society better rather than selling stuff or crying crocodile tears!