After Bournvita’s legal notice to Revant Himatsingka, even those who were blissfully unaware of the entire imbroglio got to know about it because a LOT more people started talking about the entire episode.
As I had mentioned in my post earlier this week, this is simply Streisand Effect in action and it is appalling to think that Cadbury/Mondelez India did not think through this, despite the battery of communications, PR, and marketing minds that a conglomerate like that can afford to deploy towards the problem. Or, it is precisely because there were way too many people involved that Mondelez perhaps bungled the entire thing monumentally.
Observe the timeline for some nuances.
Revant shared his video on April 1st.
Bournvita’s official response on social channels went live on April 9th.
Revant recanted his video with a public message on April 14th where he also mentioned that he’s doing this (and an apology) because of Mondelez’s legal notice.
Mondelez, on its part, said that it was “constrained to take legal recourse to avoid misinformation”.
Just imagine: Brands like iD (batter brand), Wipro, Himalaya, and Cipla (just to name a few) are relentlessly pounded with bigoted misinformation week after week, particularly on WhatsApp (besides other open social platforms) just because they happen to have Muslim founders/leaders. iD, in particular, is a misinformation magnet, with every obtuse false allegation thrown at it (which is not even worth repeating here – just Google them). If iD had sought legal recourse, it would have magnified the issue several times over. Even with such monumentally vicious and malicious misinformation, these brands have chosen to use just the truth as their defense. Given such a backdrop, Mondelez using legal recourse for just one social media video is incredibly hasty.
Understandably, the issue then blew out of proportion even on mainstream media who were reluctant to take a side given Cadbury India’s advertising might. Post Revant’s apology even mainstream media started weighing in with views by naming Cadbury and Bournvita explicitly. It went from a topic that was purely online to something that mainstream media cannot not have a view on!
Here is The Economic Times editorial page piece on it, from yesterday.
And the editorial in the Financial Express!
So, what exactly did Mondelez India get wrong? Everything, or some parts? Where did they go wrong? Just the legal notice, or something else too?
Having been part of the corporate communications space for over a decade, and also having handled digital and social media mandates for assorted brands in my agency-side stint for another decade+, here is a debrief.
There are four areas where Mondelez India bungled.
(This is an expanded piece based on my inputs to a Financial Express story on April 20, 2023)
1. Social media listening is like insurance
Given the simple fact that Mondelez India is a mega-conglomerate with so many products in India, I assume they already have an established social media command center. But a command center is as useful as what they end up doing with the listening reports and insights gathered out of it.
The problem is that brands don’t see any value in 24×7 listening because nothing much happens for 364 days, but the one day something does happen is precisely why they should constantly listen and have a plan of action for things going wrong.
Social listening, in that sense, is like insurance – we pay the premium even if nothing happens, but in the event of something happening, we finally realize how valuable that insurance was.
[Related read: Social media monitoring is like insurance. And there are ‘tax benefits’ too! – The Lenskart Example]
Where did Mondelez go wrong with listening?
See the dates again – April 1 (Revant’s video) vs. April 9 (Mondelez’s reaction).
That brings me to the 2nd mistake.
2. Real-time conversations as a result of social media listening, where needed
The second mistake by Mondelez was that they did not respond as close as possible to the viral content.
Revant posted his video on April 1st, while Bournvita took 8 more days to react, on April 9th! I assume the brand was probably caught off-guard, and deliberated across multiple internal teams and hierarchies for the best response, by which time the content had gone many times viral.
If the brand reacts as close to the offending (to the brand’s narrative) content as possible, that would mean both the original content and the brand’s reaction are likely to travel together and people are more likely to see both together, helping them in taking sides.
But in this case, Revant’s video had a clear lane to go viral with no brand response for 8-9 days! By the time it reacted, it was too late, and it’s no wonder it was left with a knee-jerk reaction to send a legal notice, helplessly looking at all the virality and celebrity support for the video.
This strategy is not even new, or social media specific. This is simply called ‘managing the news cycle’ in standard PR industry language. The basic implication is this: mainstream media works on a 24-hour cycle. If some damaging news about a brand appears in the morning, the PR agency handling the brand tries its best to respond by the end of the day so that the next day’s newspaper carries both sides of the story, without letting the story spill over to the 3rd day.
We would need to reformat this tactic to the social media world where 24-hour news cycles do not exist. So, if Revant’s incriminating video surfaced on April 1st, and Bournvita was able to cobble together a decent-enough reaction by April 2nd, from the 3rd onwards, people would end up seeing both sides of the story. This would manifest even in the comments and reactions because someone sharing only Revant’s video would start seeing people replying to them with Bournvita’s version (depending on how well it is articulated, of course).
That brings me, logically, to Bournvita’s 3rd mistake – the quality of its reaction (besides the legal notice, of course).
3. React with emotion, not like a machine
The third mistake by Mondelez was to assume that one sweeping and terse response would be enough in order to use truth as a defense.
This was Mondelez’s reaction:
From Revant’s side, the most damaging part of his video was the sugar content. He highlighted the sugar content as his anchor point, building everything around it.
But, seen from Bournvita’s side, this is simply an open secret and Bournvita is not the only one with high sugar content in the Indian market. All Bournvita had to hammer strongly was that it is 100% compliant with the laws related to ‘health drinks’ in India, and back it up by citing those rules. Revant isolated Bournvita as an offending product to make his emotional pitch, and citing the Government rules and their adherence brings Bournvita on par with every other ‘health drink’. This helps seed the question in the readers’ minds – why is Revant expecting only Bournvita to behave like Raja Harischandra, while ignoring every other health drink, from other MNCs and even Indian companies like Amul, Dabur, or Patanjali?
But this is merely the starting point – table stakes, at best.
Bournvita needed an anchor to sell its response, just like Revant used sugar to sell his video. From Bournvita’s perspective, the one thing they should have absolutely latched on to was Revant’s allegation that the product includes cancer-inducing caramel coloring.
Even the US FDA has cleared the use of caramel coloring and pointing this out categorically in its response would give Bournvita a clear, scientific, and emotional leverage to color (pun unintended) Revant’s perspective as misleading.
To be clear, Revant used the very same tactic – he used sugar as leverage to add the cancer-inducing ingredient point and people saw the former and believed the latter.
Bournvita’s response was generic, tame, and typical corporate-speak with no emotional connection. For all the “seven decades” the brand has been in India, couldn’t it gather a more credible, detailed defense to protect its product? Why stop at generic, advertising-style statements when they can get credible third parties to vouch for the claims and go all out to counter Revant’s perspective?
Brands need to realize that when the counter-content (against them) is highly emotive, they cannot resort to dry corporate speak even while stating the truth. Observe the phenomenal difference between Cadbury India’s highly emotional advertising for Bournvita (featuring mothers and sons/daughters) that makes us all share it with glee (and a tear in the eye) and the completely unemotional reaction to Revant’s video on April 9th! You could easily sense that many lawyers were involved in every word selected for the response to make it as boring and pointless as possible.
What Bournvita was trying to do was play by Revant’s rules of the game – it was merely reacting to Revant’s allegations. This is a corporate communications 101 blunder. What they should have focused on, instead, was to change the narrative, from Revant’s rules, to Bournvita’s rules of the same game. That gives people something to mull on afresh instead of seeing it all in a continuum and going back to nodding to Revant’s point of view.
To be fair, though, this is a much larger problem and Bournvita is not alone in this.
Here is Maggi going wrong on the same note, for the now-infamous MSG issue.
And INOX.
And even Cadbury India, earlier, in 2021, reacting to the ‘Halal crisis’.
The lesson is simple: never ever confuse a legal response with one meant for corporate communications. The audience for both is completely different.
The bottomline: Revant was playing to the gallery. This is simply the nature of media these days, whether it is incendiary, polarizing TV news channels like Republic, or social media influencers trying to rake up views online. It is simply what it is, and how media has evolved. So Bournvita needed to play to the same gallery. Instead, their online response was akin to standing in front of the audience with their eyes and mouth closed. Worse – the legal response was akin to shutting Revant’s mouth, in front of the same audience!
How the truth is presented is half the victory, in communications, and corporate communications, in particular. That is the crux of my next point, on Bournvita’s 4th error.
4. After the ‘what’, get your ‘how’ right too
How did Bournvita disseminate its side of the story?
There was a social media response, on channels like Twitter and Instagram.
There was some mainstream media engagement that quoted anonymous spokespersons.
And there was a legal notice, to Revant, that the entire world came to know after he made it public.
To put it simply, this was a human (Revant) vs. a nameless company (anonymous spokespersons, brand name, brand logo). That’s the recipe for reputational disaster because Bournvita, by itself, set up a David vs. Goliath story!
For a brand like Bournvita that demonstrates so much creativity in advertising, why can’t they do the same for crisis response?
Imagine the CEO of Cadbury India addressing all employees of the company about their side of the story to the offending video and that becoming the brand’s official response on social media.
It’s one thing for a cold, emotional-less brand to post a droll corporate response on social media handles, and completely another to get the CEO of the company to offer the same in a face-the-camera video. The delivery method makes an incredible difference and it is limited only by the imagination of the people Bournvita assembles for crisis management.
Bounrvita’s response not only lacked creativity, but it also lacked common sense, social media smarts, an understanding of how media and communications have evolved, and most importantly, any semblance of humanness.
But having been on the corporate side, I can understand and empathize with why things went so badly. Mondelez India is a very large organization. To get a creative reply in response to a live viral crisis in such a humongous organizational hierarchy is incredibly difficult.
This is why PR and corporate communications teams need to do mock drills by creating crisis scenarios, just like a fire drill. A fire drill’s very point is to anticipate a fire; a social media crisis communications drill’s very point is to anticipate THE WORST crisis the brand could face and have a plan of action to unleash within 24-48 hours to not only stem the reputational damage but also to change the narrative. Such drills would also list people or organizations the brand can seek help from, to amplify its point of view during a crisis, instead of being the only one shouting from the rooftop.
All this is not rocket science. This is simply corporate communications 101.