© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on May 27, 2022 in the Financial Express and is available here on the publisher’s website. In this article, I present my take on the “condescension of doing good” that is visible in recent Diwali advertising, and urge marketers to put human values first.

The version below includes links to the relevant advertisements that I discuss.

It was Cadbury that hit upon the idea of brands doing good during Diwali in a seriously big way – the 2020 ad from Cadbury Celebrations showed how small local stores that were hit by the pandemic could be brought into the customer’s consideration set through geography-based hyper-personalization. “This is not just a Cadbury ad,” they said, and so we believed: the ad nudged us towards local stores. Thus it was that in the midst of the pandemic, Cadbury found a way to do good and be good, and yet gain marketing momentum.

But the next year, as the prestige factor was upped, Shah Rukh Khan’s charisma was deemed essential to do the same job for a similar ad by Cadbury. In this ad, Shah Rukh Khan names local stores in his voiceover and this, again, was powered by technology. It wasn’t too bad, except the realization that our purchases of Celebrations were funding the expense incurred in engaging the celebrity actor.

But this year? With its #ShopsForShopless ad of 2022, Cadbury has, despite its best intentions, fallen prey to “purpose”, the new catchword in marketing. Somebody (or worse, everybody) at Cadbury seems to have decided that for Celebrations to stand out, it had to be tagged with purpose. So, now that good old eating and gifting are not enough for Diwali, the Cadbury ad tells us to scan a QR code on the sweet box, help roadside hawkers set up virtual shops, and buy from such shops. For the kind of “help” that they received, the gratitude in the eyes of Damodar (not Damodarji?!) and his helper is nauseating in its excessiveness.