A ‘factory visit’ seems to be the post-crisis campaign holy grail!
Remember the Cadbury’s ‘worms’ controversy in 2003? What was Cadbury’s post-crisis campaign response? They took Amitabh Bachchan on a Cadbury’s factory tour. Then Amitabh spoke about his factory visit in an ad.
Remember the Coca-Cola ‘pesticides’ controversy in 2006? What was Coca-Cola’s post-crisis campaign response? They took Aamir Khan on a Coca-Cola factory tour. Then Aamir Khan spoke about his factory visit in an ad.
Remember the multi-brand honey adulteration controversy in 2020? What was Dabur Honey’s eventual post-crisis campaign response? They took Sonu Sood on a factory tour. Then Sonu Sood spoke about his factory visit in an ad.
Now, remember the Bournvita – Revant ‘Food Pharmer’ Himatsingka controversy in 2023?
(Related read: The 4 areas where Bournvita bungled in that crisis)
Here comes Bournvita’s post-crisis campaign response, finally – they took a few ‘influencers’ to the Bournvita factory. Now, the influencers are singing praises of Bournvita, in short videos!
Appropriate response? That is, an influencer took Bournvita to the cleaners (after which Bournvita sued him, forced him to apologize and withdraw his videos), and now other influencers are praising Bournvita. Right?
Hardly!
In communications parlance, Revant Himatsingka would be termed ‘earned media’, while the influencers who were taken to the factory visit would be called ‘paid media’.
Paid media is anything where the brand pays money and controls the narrative. This could also be simply a print advertisement or a TV ad – the brand pays and gets to say anything it wants.
Even in print ads and TVCs, sometimes brands want to sound more credible than they really are. So, instead of telling themselves that they are stupendously great, they pay someone else with seeming credibility to say it. For instance, toothpaste brands and malt-based drink brands show doctor-type people in white coats (real doctors cannot endorse products in India) to utter great things about products in ads.
But the intent behind Cadbury’s, Coca-Cola, and Dabur Honey was not credibility. It was carpet-bombing quasi-credibility. To get a really well-known celebrity to endorse a factory visit is no different from getting that same celebrity to say great things about the product in normal print or TV ads (without factory visits). But, to induce a sense of credibility—quasi-credibility—they get the celebrity to say good things about the product during and after a factory visit.
The factory visit is supposed stand for “transparency”. In other words, “Look, we have nothing to hide, and we have the best production facility”.
It’s a fleeting promise, at best, and I presume most people know it deep down in their hearts. After all, Bachchan visiting a Cadbury’s facility is a mere photo/video-shoot. He’s not going to ask incisive, uncomfortable questions (he wouldn’t know what to ask, either). The idea is just to give an illusion of credibility.
Bournvita goes one step forward in this illusion. Instead of picking super celebrities (like actors), it picks seemingly relatable online influencers.
But the problem remains. The online influencers, since they are being paid for this engagement, are not going to ask uncomfortable questions either to Bournvita. The videos look ridiculously staged. They say things as if reading out from a brochure. And they all parrot the same thing over and over again.
In terms of a response to the biggest crisis the brand has ever faced, nothing has changed except the medium. From factory visit + super celebrities to factory visit + online influencers.
Did even one influencer ask Bournvita about Revant’s video, its aftermath, and Cadbury’s suing him?
Did one of them ask Bournvita why they reduced its sugar content in December 2023, eight months after the Revant imbroglio if there was no issue with the sugar content earlier?
Did one of them question Bournvita if the reduction of sugar was a tacit acceptance that the sugar content was very high earlier?
Even if they did ask, we may never hear or see those interactions. All we see and hear and clinically curated paid-for advertisements.
In fact, if Bournvita had attempted such a gimmick in 2023, closer to the time when they sued Revant, no influencer would have partnered with the brand no matter the fee. Why? Because that issue was making headlines regularly and was top-of-mind for most people. It’s like getting Ranveer Allahbadia to endorse a product right now, or being a guest in his show right now. It just wouldn’t happen. But it will definitely happen 12-18 months from now. Public memory is always short.
When the Revant video hit the brand, it mistook a legal response as a communications response. Both are vastly different.
In order to curb the damage, the brand deleted all comments to the posts where they explained why Revant was wrong.
And the brand remained silent because it knew that anything they say, the comments are going to be brutal. But even when it tentatively tried to get back in November 2023, the comments continued to be brutal!
This probably explains why Bournvita decided to actually relook at its sugar content, that it has always had in India, for the first time, in December 2023!
Then, starting February 2024, Bournvita has been regularly working with a lot of influencers online to promote the product, but without addressing the elephant in the room – the earlier sugar content, the major controversy, the reduction in sugar content for the first time in the product’s history, and the reasons and causes behind it.
But now, starting January 29, 2025, the brand has gone on a structured influencer overdrive with the ‘House of Taakat’ factory visit tactic.
At this point, Bournvita is merely interested in creating an illusion of credibility, and is riding on the so-called credibility of the influencers. That is questionable too, when you notice one of them mentioning proudly in her bio, ‘Worked with 900+ brands’. That literally means she would say anything any brand wants her to say, for a fee.
Not very different from a Bachchan, Aamir, or Sonu Sood, only with far less reach.
This tactic by Bournvita is adequately disappointing, but I did not expect anything else either. The ‘One influencer brought us down, so let’s use other influencers to prop us back up’ is conventional crisis response tactic.
All this would lead you to ask, ‘So, what else could they have done to win their credibility back without it seeming like a advertising gimmick?’. Oh, there are a lot of ways. But why give them away free, online… eh? The available tactics are limited only by our imagination. Plus, actual experience in public relations, corporate communications, and advertising, of course. There are enough people with that kind of experience, but the starting point would be for Bournvita to seriously consider possibilities beyond the conventional, in order to earn credibility, and not just claim whatever it wants to, on its own, or through paid influencers.
For a hint at the newer directions that one can think about other tactics, consider what iD (batter) did in 2024, for World Idly Day (March 30th).
iD took 5 grandmothers to their factory and convinced them about the cleanliness, ingredients, and the process! But the grandmothers were not ‘influencers’ with large social media following – they were just normal women. And older women like the ones iD showcased are generally presumed to be not amenable to coercion by money or corporate influence.
In comparison, online influencers are just dying to work with big brands like Bournvita since it gives them money and the “creds” to pitch that to other brands and get more branded deals. But grandmothers? They couldn’t care less.
That’s where iD scored smartly. My favorite analogy applies here – Lord Murugan’s tactic (Bournvita working with a dozen+ influencers all with a vested interest in parroting what the brand orders them to, for a fee) vs. Lord Ganesha’s tactic (grandmothers, seen as discerning, with no social media following), towards attaining the divine fruit.
But Bournvita does the same thing all over again, with just a simple change of media.