Giva’s retreat is more revealing than Kriti Sanon’s bralette

There was a time when the worst thing that could happen to an ad was that nobody noticed it. Now, the real danger is being noticed by the wrong people. Giva, the D2C jewellery brand, has just demonstrated why. It withdrew its Raksha Bandhan ad featuring actor Kriti Sanon after criticism of the outfit she wore in it.

Actor and Bharatiya Janata Party MP Kangana Ranaut called the ad “intentionally creepy” and questioned why anyone would tie a rakhi “in your bikini/undergarments”. Kriti Sanon defended the ad, arguing that culture lives in sentiment rather than in a neckline. Giva nevertheless pulled it, accompanied by the now-customary assurance that it has the highest regard for Indian culture and never intended to hurt anyone’s sentiments. The irony is that the ad was not really about religion or modesty at all. Giva said it was trying to extend Raksha Bandhan to pets.

Evidently, a company can now be forced into a public apology over an idea that was, at worst, twee. Nor is this the first time an Indian brand has blinked. In 2020, Tanishq withdrew an ad showing a pregnant Hindu woman whose Muslim in-laws organised her godh bharaai, a traditional baby shower. As #BoycottTanishq trended amidst accusations it was promoting “love jihad”, Tanishq chose to backtrack.

The debate following the Giva ad has centred around whether such ads are wise or tasteful. But the more relevant question is, when did brands become so frightened of people who may not even be their customers.

Sure, companies have to listen to their customers. But social media has distorted that relationship. Those offended are highly visible; the millions who watched an ad and simply moved on, are not. In 1974, the German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described this as the “spiral of silence”: people who think their views are unpopular stay quiet, while those who believe they speak for the majority grow louder. The result is a badly skewed sense of what most people actually think. We can see that clearly in this case: a few thousand angry posts, a trending hashtag, an opportunistic politician, and suddenly an ad is treated as a threat to the nation’s soul.

Sadly, what companies in such situations miss is the far larger number of people who watched the Giva ad and forgot about it within the hour. That asymmetry leads to a particular kind of corporate cowardice. After all, nobody can get fired for a boring advertisement, but someone might get sacked for a controversial one. Faced with choosing between a little creative upside and career-threatening backlash, the rational choice is to back off.

Except that a brand cannot differentiate itself by ensuring nobody is ever offended. In the 1990s, Benetton built campaigns around an AIDS patient dying, a priest kissing a nun, war and the death penalty. It faced strident criticism and endured boycotts, but refused to back down because it understood that a brand with a point of view will always have detractors.

Indian advertising, too, once had some of that nerve. Kamasutra condoms were not built by worrying whether uncles and aunties would approve. Liril's Karen Lunel, cavorting under a waterfall in the 1980s, sold freedom and a kind of female independence that was hardly conventional at the time. More recently, Surf Excel’s 2019 Holi ad, showing a Hindu girl getting drenched in colour so her Muslim friend could stay clean for prayers, survived a #BoycottSurfExcel campaign because Hindustan Unilever refused to pull it.

None of this means a brand should deliberately provoke consumers. But it should be able to withstand disagreement. What gets lost in the panic following the outrage is a key distinction: an ad that has annoyed actual customers versus one that has ruffled the feathers of a very visible minority which wasn’t going to buy its products anyway. Companies in such situations declare a crisis without anyone checking whether potential sales had actually been affected, or whether it was just the flavour of the hour on social media. Trending is being allowed to pass itself off as a business metric.

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The irony is that companies spend millions trying to get consumers to notice them, hiring celebrities and agencies to provoke exactly the emotional response they later apologise for. The old retail maxim says the customer is always right. Corporate India might rediscover the part that was never written down: the customer can also be wrong. If nobody is ever offended by an ad, it is more likely nobody is paying attention either.

In Company Outsider, Sundeep Khanna distills more than three decades of his experience writing on India Inc. into a thousand words of context and insights that few can bring to the table. Want this newsletter delivered in your inbox? Subscribe here.