Recently, Surf Excel came under heavy fire for its new advertisement showcasing the spirit around the festival of Holi. Although the video was seemingly innocent with a very simple yet impactful message, a certain faction of people managed to twist the message of communal harmony and unity that the advertisement aimed to portray.
Having driven the ire of people for no intended malice, what does it mean for Surf Excel? It’s an age-old saying that ‘no publicity is bad publicity’, which probably means that even though Surf Excel was caught in the eye of the storm, what this entire episode managed to do was to create brand awareness in the minds of the consumers.
People were discussing the controversy on social media platforms, with Surf Excel being right in the centre of those discussions. This gave Surf Excel a lot of spotlight, their advertisement on YouTube has already racked up 9.9 million views in one week. On Twitter #SurfExcel has been trending ever since the advertisement came out and people have been calling out all those who were trying to add an unnecessary political twist to a pretty straightforward message.
In an unfortunate albeit somewhat funny development of events, a certain number of people went on the android and apple app store and started giving 1-star ratings to the MS Excel app, which had no connection to any part of this controversy whatsoever. Facebook is abuzz with a discussion around this topic and people are drawing parallels as to how this chain of events was visibly reminiscent of the time when Snapdeal bore the brunt of the Snapchat controversy and people began uninstalling the Snapdeal app from their phones and giving it a single star rating on the app store.
As an incident, this may look funny but the negative psychological undertone of such actions is pretty hard to miss. It shows the frail nature of people and how mediums of communications are no less than minefields in today’s time.
Curbing and responding to the problems of every individual on the internet is an impossible task and the best way for firms to operate is to put out such positive messages out there via their campaigns. If the intent behind the message is right, it will appeal to the right audience and stick with them. As for the people who get offended, they just become another source of unpaid publicity for the brand.
You can check out the video by clicking on the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq7mN8oi8ds