Tanishq's Brand Activism Failure: Exploring Consumer Brand Sabotage through the Lens of Morality

Brand activism is a tricky concept which can act as a double-edged sword. If brands are not careful with their campaigns, brand activism can also result in negative consumer sentiments. These negative sentiments can spread quickly on social media due to the nature of virality of content on social media. These negative sentiments can quickly take the form of more aggressive consumer brand sabotage activities if appropriate crisis management measures are not implemented in time. These vindictive brand sabotage activities can also significantly affect brand reputation. This study explores the negative consumer discourse caused by brand activism failure on a social media platform, Twitter, in the context of a sensitive socio-political landscape: India. This study focuses on the brand activism failure of a popular Indian jewellery brand called Tanishq, and its advertising campaign called ‘Ekatvam’, meaning oneness. The advertisement, which carried the message of religious harmony, stirred controversy for its depiction of an interfaith couple. A section of consumers belonging to the Hindu community did not like the idea of a Hindu daughter-in-law in a Muslim household and accused Tanishq of promoting anti-Hindu messages on social media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube. The overwhelming negative response to a seemingly positive advertisement in a religiously volatile sociopolitical context is the crux of this study. This thesis seeks to understand the negative consumer behaviour from the lens of morality; how and why do consumers arrive at certain moral judgements that prompt action on social media against a brand. To answer the research question ‘How and why did consumers engage in consumer brand sabotage on Twitter in response to Tanishq brand activism failure?’, a qualitative mixed methods approach is taken. This thesis makes use of digital research methods: topic modelling, sentiment analysis and social network analysis, along with qualitative thematic analysis to understand the moral dimensions that reflected in the tweets of consumers who participated in the #boycotttansihsq trend from the year 2020 to 2022 on Twitter. The findings show that the network of the Twitter users is well-connected and with a few influential users driving the CBS conversations. The results emphasise on the association between consumer brand sabotage and morality and add to the literature on situational crisis communication theory by providing evidence for a crisis arising out of value misalignment based on religion.