Misleading Endorsements – Where Does The Blame Lie?

-


The recent controversy regarding celebrity endorsers being penalized for misleading endorsement has brought to light an old debate. Is spurious brand endorsement merely the responsibility of an endorser? What is the brand's obligation in making a claim? If something goes wrong, where and how does the blame get assigned? All combined, the debate about changes to the Consumer Protection Bill surrounding the penalization of celebrity brand endorsers with misleading claims ought to be conducted on an open platform. There are several layers to the debate and these must be considered carefully before the panel’s recommendations are put into effect.

At present, the debate revolves around the suggestions of a parliamentary standing committee on food, consumer affairs, and public distribution, which recommends celebrities be held accountable for the brands they endorse. If the parliamentary panel’s recommendations are accepted, a celebrity endorsing a brand that has a misleading advertisement can be fined up to INR 50 lakh or a jail term of up to five years. It can be argued that owing to their celebrity status, any brand endorsed by celebrities is automatically found attractive by the masses. However, is a celebrity status enough to be incriminated? Shouldn’t both the promoter and endorser be held accountable?

The argument that consumers blindly believe endorsements by celebrities, though not entirely flawed, has a few drawbacks. Firstly, a celebrity endorser is at the end of the day an actor, and her/his role in the endorsement also involves putting up an act. Celebrity endorsement often is crucial in terms of reaching a large number of people, but does the endorsement by a celebrity prove critical for the audience to accept the brand? Influencing audiences to use a brand may have a correlation with celebrity endorsement, but establishing a causal relation between the two seems doubtful. In fact, every advertisement that is aired is one that involves paid actors acting out a concept approved by the promoters of the brand. Where, then, can we draw the line between acting and real endorsement? It becomes imperative, therefore, for the government of India along with the relevant bodies to formulate proper guidelines enlisting the boundaries of spurious endorsement.

Furthermore, it is essential to build a formal protocol to check the authenticity of consumer complaints as well as one to calculate the extent of the monetary damage inflicted by misleading endorsement before incriminating celebrity endorsers. This will be another essential step towards demystifying the discussion around misleading celebrity endorsement. Once again, the onus falls back on developing and having stricter guidelines in place that ensures an objective assessment of the concerned parties.

Misleading brand endorsement is a conversation that has been going around for a while. However, what this controversy needs is not more attention from media but from the legal community of the country. There is a dire need for creating a concise legal framework that neatly outlines the terms and conditions of endorsement; there is also a need to define the contours of spurious or misleading endorsement. Laws are essential to help outline the extent of responsibility on the side of the endorser and the promoter respectively. Without such a framework, things will stay murky in the world of advertisement and celebrity endorsement.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why magazines are even more relevant today

-
Image
If there's a commodity that perishes as swiftly as it is created, it is news.  The longer it takes to create, the higher its longevity and by corollary, news produced by the second, dies by the second.  We want our gratifications without any waiting period, we want to gulp down our food, build instant abs, get rich immediately and also know everything now.  We are also anxious to know more and more, and information has become a status-according social currency.   Fortunately, acquisition of knowledge does not have a finish line and so it behaves quite differently from instant abs or instant noodles.  In this hurried age, magazines play an important role by balancing societal myopia with perspective; need-for-speed with understanding, and anxiety with patience. The magazines analyze and opine like the elders of society - and hence also play the role of elders in the information society. In an age when every new opinion becomes news, magazines bring perspect...
Read more

Science of Apology in Communications

-
An Apology in all crisis circumstances is the most important tool that rebuilds the perception of positive intent. This in turn, forms one of the three most important pillars of rebuilding (corporate) 'Trust'. For an apology to be impactful it must have three important components. Firstly, it must be honest (and must also seem as genuine as it really is). Secondly, it must show self-sacrifice (which implies that the company or person making the apology must make a statement for the public good). And lastly, it must be done with the right attitude (which implies that it must be made in time & in the right manner). Even if one of these three aspects is missing from the apology, the apology becomes counter productive and often deteriorates the image further. When organizations willingly or unknowingly commit errors, the act almost always erodes the trust the stakeholders have painstakingly built and placed on the organization. This is because such errors question two more...
Read more

Killing Them Softly…

-
Image
The Essentials of Managing Ethics in Financial Public Relations The world has woken up to ethical issues in corporate governance & accounting practices. Corporate heads that were not guillotined were forced hang their heads in retrospective shame. The heads that fell were the victimizers, and the axe that fell, fell too late, and the punishment received, was way too little compared to the suffering, pain and financial losses that the organizations’ stakeholders suffered. Trust of millions of investors was lost overnight. Ethics in governance is one part of the story, the other link in this dubious chain of deceit is usually the professional services like auditing, legal and public relations which work closely with the organization. Such large scale deceit becomes possible only with the active collaboration of these so-called ‘professional’ services. Hardly professional, really! The Indian investor has been victim to a lot of companies attempting to make a quick buck in the markets....
Read more