On October 7, 2014 when Flipkart CEOs Sachin and Binny Bansal posted a personal and detailed apology on the site blog for their ‘Big Billion Day Sale’ fiasco a day earlier, it went viral on Facebook and Twitter. They not only accepted that they had erred, but also managed to recover a lot of Flipkart’s customer loyalty by soothing irate buyers. Conversely, when Uber executive Emil Michael had reportedly suggested a smear campaign against a female journalist who has been criticising the company, a lackluster Twitter apology from the company’s CEO Travis Kalanick did little to appease the social media outrage. “The idea is to be as transparent as you can possibly be, as promptly as you can possibly be. These are the two key aspects of crisis management,” says Rajiv Dingra, Founder and CEO, WATConsult, a social and digital agency. While Flipkart successfully executed both prongs of consumer relationship management in the face of a crisis, a few other clever saves by Indian companies, both home-grown and branches of international MNCs can tell you a little about how to make sure your company does not dilute its brand equity in a social media crisis.

#1 Mamagoto, Azure Hospitality Pvt. Ltd

Mamagoto's advertising may have been catchy, but it didn't cut ice with the restaurant's patrons.
Courtesy: Facebook.com/FoodTalkIndia

The popular chain of restaurants that serves pan-Asian cuisines in metros across India, faced flak in July 2014 for a controversial campaign that promoted its newly launched Asian sandwiches. The reproach was aimed at posters that depicted an Asian lady suggestively holding a pair of bread buns - called ‘Mamabuns’- with the caption, ‘Take an Asian Home’.

A recent hate-crime against a Northeastern man in Delhi only made the connotation worse, and soon Mamagoto was in the middle of a public relations disaster. Pictures of the table standees from the company’s outlet went viral and quick search for the #Mamagoto on Twitter would throw up keywords like racism, misogyny and sexism.Said Shuchir Suri, the co-founder of Food Talk India, a growing food community in India, "Any advertisement which could amount to a racial slur is most undesirable. There are better ways to promote a product." 

To combat this storm, Mamagoto withdrew the advertisements and took ownership of its folly.

 “We are extremely sorry if we offended anyone as we did not mean to hurt anybody’s sentiments. This was a bad judgment call and we take full responsibility. Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention, we are completely removing this piece of communication. We do hope you do not let this lapse in judgment hinder your perspective of our brand. Once again we are extremely apologetic. Team Mamagoto FunAsian.”

 The timely and corrective action helped the company halt the negative publicity and prevented an escalation of the isolated incident.

#2 PepsiCo India

The poster that had been used by Pepsi on its account without Pathak's permission.

In May 2013, PepsiCo posted a seemingly harmless poster on Facebook asking its followers what their weekend looked like. However, as more people began to respond, Akshar Pathak -the man behind Minimal Bollywood Posters- realised that the Pepsi was using a poster he had designed for Sholay, without any consent or credit. Outraged by the intellectual property right violation, Pathak posted his claim on Facebook, and before long there were over 200 people engaged in the conversation. However, what could potentially have been a PR disaster for the brand was averted by its quick crisis management. Within an hour, Pepsi took the poster off its page and apologised to Pathak for the indiscretion. A placated Pathak soon posted on Facebook, crediting Pepsi for its prompt action.

This post soothed all his fans and customers, who not only forgave PepsiCo, but also attributed the apology to the company’s standing as a respectable brand. By understanding where it went wrong, owning up and leveraging the power of social media, Pepsi actually turned the situation to its advantage.  

So the guys at Pepsi India took the Minimal Bollywood Posters post down within an hour and wrote me an apology, intent on resolving the matter asap. Great to know that they have a reporting system in place and actually take copyright infringement very seriously”- Akshar Pathak 

#3 Allen Solly, Madura Fashion and Lifestyle, Aditya Birla Nuvo Ltd

Allen Solly's tongue-in-cheek response helped it avoid embarrassment and gain social media traction.

Allen Solly is Madura Fashion’s professional dressing brand, competing with Blackberry and Van Heusen. It provides trendy, youth-centric quality professional wear. Due to its brand positioning, the company maintains a very active social media presence as well.

When B.G. Mahesh, Managing Director of Oneindia spotted a typo- “Comming Soon”, on an Allen Solly hoarding in a mall at Bangalore, he immediately tweeted a picture to his 10 000 followers online. Allen Solly reacted quickly and thanked him for bringing this error to their notice. But the company wasn’t done.

Two days later, Allen Solly came up with an innovative, humble and humorous apology for Mr. Mahesh. In a tweet, with him tagged, the company posted a picture of a ruled school notebook saying, “We will not spell Coming Soon as Comming Soon.” By bringing in a humble apology everyone could relate to,  “they owned up to their mistake, and even added a funny twist to it,” says Dingra. This social media move caught so many eyeballs that Twitter India added this conversation to their deck as a case study.

#4 Snapdeal and Hindustan Unilever

The Facebook post that signaled the beginning of troubled times for Snapdeal.

In November this year, Lakshminarayan Krishnamurthy, a Mumbai resident, ordered a Samsung Core Duos phone as a Diwali gift from Snapdeal. What he received was a Samsung package with a bar of Vim soap and half a brick. When he couldn’t contact the online shopping platform’s customer service, he decided to resort to social media and posted a picture of his delivery. Krishnamurthy’s post soon went viral on Facebook with more than 20,000 users slamming Snapdeal for defrauding a customer. Snapdeal got in touch with Krishnamurthy, explained that the problem had resulted from a fault with an external courier company, apologized and refunded the amount he had paid.

Hindustan Unilever, which has recently been investing in its digital media team to cut down advertising costs, stepped in and stepped up. The company sent Krishnamurthy a package that contained the phone he had originally ordered, two bottles of Vim liquid soap and a letter. In one shot, the company empathised with Krishnamurthy and grabbed an excellent opportunity to promote Vim.

In a letter to Krishnamurthy, Vim noted, “The pictures you posted online show that our brand was used in this incident. Vim is one of our iconic brands with some great consumer franchise. We felt bad about it, not to mention what you went through. Here is a small gesture from our side to cheer you up.”An elated Krishnamurthy took to social media again. This time to credit HUL for its magnanimity. Needless to say, in this round of social media warfare, Snapdeal:0 - HUL:1.  

#5 Zomato

Early in May this year, Zomato came up with a recruitment advertisement that cheekily attempted to make Delhi the new tech capital of India. The advertisement claimed to be confused about Bangalore’s monopoly over this coveted position given the traffic and housing rates in the city. Before the company knew it, it was caught in between a flurry of allegations for its perceived racism and arrogance. As the digital conversations around the advertisements increase, so did the anger. People from Bangalore and Chennai deleted the app, creating mock sites of Zomato’s main page and even gave it a low rating on Google play to lower the company’s average rating.

 Within a day, the company’s official blog put up an apology from its founder Deepinder Goyal saying, “We’re Crazy. Not Stupid.”

A carefully written, apologetic and non-stenciled apology helped the company avert an unanticipated catastrophe and come out relatively unscathed from the incident. 

 The potential of fast moving digital data amongst customers to positively and negatively impact a brand’s image is something that companies in India need to realize. Sabyasachi Mitter, CEO of Interface Business Unified, a digital agency, feels there’s still a long way to go. “In India, there’s the attitude of keeping quiet and hoping things die down and that reflects in the way companies deal with a crisis too.” The need of the hour is for companies to increasingly invest in digital marketing and brand management, comprehending that with the growth of social media, the customer-producer relationship is now becoming strongly two-sided. With a post and a few clicks, the brand image of an entire company can become dubious. A ready-to-go command control for escalation in times of crisis should be present in every organization looking to expand or even sustain today.

Air Jordan VIII Low