What the Congress can learn from Nestle's Maggi crisis
Nestle and the Congress have a lot in common, the party needs to take a leaf out of Nestle's handling of the Maggi debacle to regain lost ground
In 2015, Nestle found itself in its worst crisis in India. Its most beloved and fast selling product, Maggi, the 2-minute wonder, was banned. For 5 months, the product which most Indians grew up with was off the shelves and the confidence of mothers who relied on Maggi as a hunger quick fix for their children was completely shaken.
Dissing a competitor before entering the marketing, destroying their credibility, is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing handbook and the jury is still out whether the lead controversy was blown out of proportion by Patanjali foods which launched its own instant noodles claiming to be a harmless alternative.
There are many parallels in this brand story with that of the Congress. Since around 2010-11, the Congress has been faced with attacks on its credibility. Like Nestle, the Congress has a long legacy of being part of life in India, a recall value. Maggi is what one grew up with, many Indians have memories of major life events around Maggi; the hostel Maggi, the trekking Maggi, Maggi as the first thing they ever cooked as a child. The Congress similarly has been around for some of the major events in the history of India as a nation. The independence struggle, the first post independence government formation, the first strides in independent education and science and research in India. You get the drift about how similar this story can be from a brand point of view, don’t you?
The legacy that blinds the brand
If you look at Nestle’s initial handling of the crisis too, there are parallels to the Congress reaction to the BJP challenge. Nestle at first didn’t believe an obscure lab report could shake its foundations. So it doubled down on the denial and put up its own lab reports in court. But this did nothing for its perception, as being a giant, it had the disadvantage of people’s automatic mistrust. This is a very human trait, we tend to look at anyone with enough success as somewhat suspicious. Nestle came across as arrogant - something the Congress and the family that heads it, have been accused of.
Like Nestle, the Congress too reacted initially to all the social media chatter around it and its leadership with a slightly superior attitude of ‘this is so outrageous, no one will believe it’. The systemic weakening of Congress’ narrative started sometime in the ‘90s on Yahoo email groups and has now progressed to Whatsapp and social media. But the Congress thought it would all die down, perhaps bolstered by the belief that a large chunk of population that had been part of the historic events being misrepresented was still alive. What it did not count on was the young, the future voters, who had access to these new forms of communication and who had no lived experience of these events, the voices of those who had felt sidelined during Congress’ long rule and also that the old guard would not live forever.
But Maggi has bounced back from the 5 month ban to almost the same levels of sale as before and the debacle is a distant memory in the minds of most consumers. So what did Nestle do right that the Congress hasn’t managed to?
Ground connect, facts and emotions
Once Nestle realised whatever they were doing, was not working, they announced an urgent recall of the product and decided to go back to the drawing board. Around the time of the recall, a nationwide ban on Maggi was announced. The parallel to this in Congress’ lifetime can be the 2014 elections, where the electorate rejected them quite badly.
Nestle, it is said, started speaking directly to its employees and the dealers to get feedback and solutions from the ground up. This also made the employees feel safe in a volatile situation and have more ownership of the brand. From 2014 onwards, a recurrent complaint of many who have left Congress has been that their feedback with respect to elections and handling of party affairs was not taken into consideration. While these reports may be exaggerated on some counts, it is a fact that the Congress has let go of its cadre. This was most visible in the just concluded UP elections. The Congress mounted a highly visible campaign in the state and by its own estimates expected lower double digits, but you cannot win if you don’t have feet on the ground on a regular basis. Nestle knew this, it kept its channels open with its distributors even as it launched on Snapdeal once the ban was lifted. One could argue that Nestle had other products too and decades long relations with its distributors so the chain wouldn’t be snapped so soon. But this was an advantage even the Congress had. For years, it was the only party even in the remotest parts of the country. It had a huge organisational structure that it could leverage, but unfortunately frittered away for reasons best known to the party. In the recent times, it has been clear that it is only cadre based regional parties like the TMC which have been able to present an electoral challenge to the BJP.
“This is a case where you can be so right and yet so wrong. We were right on factual arguments and yet so wrong on arguing,” Paul Bulcke, Nestlé Global CEO told Fortune.
Every brand manager worth his salt knows that emotional connect to the consumer is of prime importance. Nestle capitalised on the nostalgia factor. Its relaunch ads spoke about the connect with the country and its history with the country. To a certain extent, the Congress is doing this of late by talking about the party’s contribution to nation building in its social media campaigns. But the major difference here is that Nestle still has a product that is almost the same (with or without the lead) quality as before the ban. It is a bit like the comeback of an old time star, think Sridevi in English Vinglish. The nostalgia was there, but there was also no denying Sridevi’s performance.
This is where the Congress is faltering though. Its current leaders don’t seem to have the same kind of ground connect or acumen the older generation had. Either they need to make space for others who can do it better or they need to learn it and learn it by forgetting their own storied history, rebuild as if they are new to this country and their leaders don’t have long legacies to hark back to. You can counter as many facts as you like, but if the emotional connect fails, it doesn’t work. You can argue that the BJP’s emotional connect is based on hatred, but hatred is also an emotion and a very strong one at that. The party has failed to have that kind of emotional connect with the present generation due to various factors.
Moral high ground versus hard grind
Despite speculation about Patanjali and also other brands making hay while Maggi burnt, Nestle being a corporate did not have the luxury of blaming it all on the other side or even the government. It had to deal with an entire machinery and other competitors on the basis of its own product and work put into it. Brands cannot run social media campaigns blaming their debacles on other brands’ methods, even if they are devious.
The Congress being a political party, actually has this advantage. It can continue to blame the BJP and its methods. The more adventurous of its leaders and supporters even blame the electorate. But for brand Congress to make a comeback, it needs to get into the hard grind, it needs to stop framing its narrative as Congress versus Modi’s politics, because this is exactly the space BJP wants it to be in, as a personality clash will only be in BJP’s advantage. The Congress did try to go back to some basics with the work it did of helping people amidst the Covid crisis. But it needs more such people centric campaigns to go along with its criticism of the current regime.
By all means the Congress should refute propaganda or lies. But at the end of the day, like Nestle did, it will have to regroup, restart its work, rebuild its image bit by bit and show actual ground presence to win over the public. So long as the Congress leadership doesn’t improve its organisational reach, no amount of scoring points on social media or television debates will help it. The point scoring has perhaps made Rahul Gandhi a little more visible than the times when the BJP had relegated him to an inept forgettable dynast, but despite being the second largest party in terms of MLAs in the country, there is still a long road ahead before Congress regains its emotional connect with the electorate.