Comparative Advertising - AD Wars by Amul

"AMUL"  one of the most loved brands in India is known for its innovative and cheeky advertisements which makes everyone go aww. But a recent comparative advertisement which it released on print and social media caused a small AD war.

So what is this comparative advertising?

According to Investopedia Comparative advertising is a marketing strategy in which a company's product or service is presented as superior when compared to a competitor's. A comparative advertising campaign may involve printing a side-by-side comparison of the features of a company's products next to those of its competitor. 

This advertisement is what caused it all

A simple innocent looking question

 "Does your butter cookie contain butter or vegetable oil?"

You can read the original tweet by clicking on this link.

  This created a lot of interaction online and many started posting their own content of different brands of biscuits and complained.

Every brand of biscuit which claimed as butter cookie was dragged in by the consumers, this was further enhanced by the contest which was titled as #AmulButterCookie challenge which made people tweet out with comparative images.

This is not the first time when Amul has done comparative advertising; it has earlier done it for its ice-cream range, where it asked whether you are having ice-cream or frozen dessert. It was taking advantage of a regulatory rule which listed products made from vegetable oil as frozen dessert. 

Not only Amul but Havmor icecreams also sent out a cheeky ad targeting frozen desserts.

HUL was not humoured and it approached the courts and argued the advertisement was disparaging its product and got an injunction against the advertisement which it prominently displays in its webpage, along with the comparision chart of process of making frozen desserts and ice-creams.

But In this case of butter cookies, Amul has met its match in Britannia , they turned the tables on Amul and put forward to customers how much fat will they consume in this ad.

They ended with this tag saying

 "Too Much Butter may not always be better."

Now this is what we require in a good ad war. Lets see how it progresses....

#GoBackModi - Pakistan or Tamil Nadu who trends it?

Love Him or Hate Him you cannot ignore him. Mr. Narendra Modi has this polarising effect on people. The PR team of Indian government has done an excellent job of promoting the PM's Image as a person who loves Tamil Tradition.

The carefully curated Tweets, in tamil

The  selection of food menu to showcase Southern Cuisine

 Summit Menu 

And most importantly the optics, a prime minister in perfect dhoti and angavastram.

Everything is going on well where can it go wrong.

Enter the Tamilians, the villans where some of them started trending #GoBackModi

and #GoBackModiWelcomeXiJinping. Now they went even more a step ahead and trended in mandarin #回到莫迪 . The Spin Narrative : It would still not have been a big issue for PR, as it could have been credited to political opponents who are trending. The governments PR team did a bad move where they started circulating a fake Hastag analysis saying 40% of tweets is from Pakistan. Now this is something a hare brained scheme from some amateur who has no idea of Twitter and Hashtag analytics. Some news papers have also picked this up and published news reports.

North east times

times of India report

Republic Report

Twitter Influencers folly:

The Twitter Influencers who are pro-Modi started to pick this up and trended the tweets which suspected Pakistan angle, and some regional newspapers also followed it.

Twitter users were quick to burst this narrative when people started their own analysis of the trend and further burst the myth. a twitter user made a detailed trend analysis and posted the result, which you can read here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182865025213575169.html

So what did the PR Team did wrong?

• Simple, when you have negative sentiments towards your subject, you try to minimise the attention. So they should have ignored #GoBackModi
• If you plan on reducing the impact do a counter narrative #TNWelcomesModi, In this case this did not work as, the trend was inorganic and most handles promoting it was from affiliates of BJP.
• If nothing works you should be silent and wait for the trend to end naturally, it would have ended in two days, here the PR team did a great blunder and planted this story about Pakistan angle which made this trend even more popular. 

To Summarize the mood of people in one tweet, you should look at this exchange which happened between Rajdeep Sardesai and a twitter user

Edit On 14-12-2020

So I came across this new website called https://hashtagify.me/ so it offered some new tools, so I tried this tool on this #GoBackModi and the results are below.

So It settles, most of the tweets are from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and other southern states.