The Business Cost of Courting Controversy

Once every now and then, we witness a popular brand releasing a campaign – a creative representation that sits too close to a line. It may be a taboo gently prodded, a festive celebration reimagined or a cultural belief given a modern edit and a new meaning – and for a few days, these campaigns work exactly as they are intended. They get liked, shared, amplified, and talked about, creating a visibility beyond what the media budget of the brand alone could have bought.

Then in another instance a similar creative approach to a campaign produces an opposite outcome - it gets disliked, shared and argued over. The negative backlash leads to the campaign getting withdrawn, the brand apologises, and the story that is created and spread ceases to be about the product or the service anymore.

It is very easy and tempting to say that these mishaps are created by a brand’s misunderstanding of social and cultural boundaries. As a marcom professional, I disagree. Many a time, these bets are deliberately placed by the brands to get noticed and attract the much-needed attention, which is a rare commodity in a crowded marketplace. 

A campaign built around a sensitive theme, be it faith, tradition, identity or gender, helps to start a conversation, which a straightforward or safe advertising never could. Although this logic is not hidden, you will rarely find a marketer saying it out loud. This potential for conversation makes it attractive for the brands to take the risk. Brands consciously enter a controversial territory, and a few purposely test these social and cultural boundaries with visibility as their only focus.

In the recent past in our country, during the festive season alone we’ve seen several such brand campaigns, where apparel, jewellery and personal-care brands attempted to give a familiar occasion an inclusive or a contemporary spin, only to find that each of them landing very differently, depending on which fault line the campaign brushed against. Be it religion and tradition in one instance, gender in another and sexuality in the third, the pattern remained the same: backlash the campaign received over the reinterpretation, the “it was not our intent to offend” apology received from the brand, and the swift withdrawal of the campaign. 

Any campaign is created targeting a particular audience in mind. But given the vast digital dominion that we live in today, any idea aimed at a specific, receptive segment reaches anyone and everyone with a feed. The reinterpretation of the idea by the unintended audience, through a very different social or cultural lens creates the risk, leading to the brand losing its narrative, leading to discomfort, anger, apology, and withdrawal. 

Once apologies are issued and the campaign is withdrawn, the conversations quieten. During the storm, and soon after that, the debates across media platforms focus on whether the brand was right or wrong to release a controversial campaign. However, the question that never gets asked is whether this risky bet actually cost the brand and if so, how much.

Some of the engagement that a controversial campaign generates does not result in people warming up to the brand. Today’s technology with its news archives and social listening reports will keep the brand’s name associated with “controversy” for a very long time, whether it is resolved or not. Sometimes these campaigns get written up as case studies and taught years later in B-Schools, which formalises the brand association rather than letting it fade from the memory. This cost has no definite expiry date. Unlike the marketing RoI conversation, this impact rarely or never gets measured, written or discussed with rigour in any marketing reviews.
My intention is not to present these arguments and suggest brands to retreat to safe and forgettable campaigns. I fully agree that attention is scarce, and brands that never take creative risks will eventually fail to create an impact. While brands need to continue to test boundaries through creativity to make an impact, it should not at the same time lead them discover those boundaries through a public failure.

To avoid this risk, brands need to test and validate creative ideas before spending money and inviting a backlash. Relying on a last-minute legal check may help to spot a liability, but it will not help identify any cultural friction. And, a creative team understandably will not be in a position to review its own idea and raise a red flag. Therefore, what brands need is a third perspective at an early stage to test the creative idea. Brands should stress test the idea to see whether the message is being received the way it is intended, and whether there is a possibility of creating unintended interpretations among a larger audience it may reach. 

Building a strong internal filtering process that applies well-defined cultural and ethical boundaries of the organization, society and country that the brand operates, at the campaign conceptualisation stage will help to avoid later challenges. If done well, this process will not curb creativity, but instead will help create bolder works that remain within the defined framework. Time and again, clear boundaries have forced people to think more resourcefully and produce unique and creative results. 

Without this process, the brand allows the market to find the boundary at full volume, forcing the brand to pay more for the discovery. And it ends up paying many times – once when the campaign is withdrawn, and again and again with every subsequent controversial campaign that follows.

In the future, brands will continue releasing controversial campaigns, to get noticed and stay memorable. They should. However, the only real choice they are left with is to stress-test the intent and the boundary beforehand through a well-defined process or discover them through an open public back-lash. The first approach will help them to take calculated risks with a clear backup plan. The other approach will lead them to gamble with their money and reputation, without any insurance cover.