BSC vs Gillette, Beco vs HUL: Who Owns the Truth When Challenger Brands Take on Giants?

A man buying a razor does not think about market power. He thinks about a blade that fits the handle already in his bathroom, does its work, and costs what he is willing to part with. A person reaching for dishwashing liquid does not commonly inquire into what has been dissolved in it. Yet these small, unconsidered acts are the matter of a large contest: who determines what choices are set before the buyer, and in what words those choices are described to her.

Two disputes now before the Delhi High Court have made that contest visible. Bombay Shaving Company's Switch4 campaign put it in the shaving aisle; Beco's War on What's Hidden campaign put it in the home-care shelf. Different products, different claims, different rivals. But both turn on a single question that advertising law only partly answers: when a brand says it acts in the consumer's interest, what does that actually require of it?

Of the market before anyone complains

Markets have this in common with old customs — what has long been done acquires the appearance of what must be done. A product format becomes conventional, buyers accommodate themselves to it, and in time the accommodation is mistaken for a law of nature. It is no such thing. It is only an arrangement that has not lately been disturbed.

Bombay Shaving Company attempted to disturb it. Its Switch4 cartridge carries four blades and is built to fit the handles of the common three-blade razor, so that a person need not discard the handle in his hand in order to change the blade upon it. Founder Shantanu Deshpande has argued that no one ought to be confined in his choice of blade by the accident of which handle he already owns. The company says it will "continue to innovate, challenge the status quo and stand up for consumer choice, without compromise," and that at the heart of Switch4 lies a plain belief: 'consumers deserve the freedom to choose'.

Beco has disturbed something else which we covered in our earlier in-depth story with the founder Aditya Ruiah. Its campaign set its own products beside Hindustan Unilever's Surf Excel Matic Liquid and Vim Dishwash Gel, placing ingredients and disclosure at the centre of the comparison — proposing that a buyer of household goods ought to weigh a consideration beyond price and cleaning power.

In both cases the innovation lies not merely in the article sold but in the convention surrounding how it is bought. That is a real service. But observe carefully: to question an established product is not the same as to have proved every particular said against it. The first is a liberty. The second is a burden.

Reputation is also a kind of property

A company that has laboured for years to make its name signify something holds an interest in that name which is not trifling. Advertising forms the buyer's trust, and a comparison that is inaccurate does not merely wound a rival — it misinforms the very person in whose name the comparison was made.

Gillette India therefore objected to how its products were portrayed. The court took exception to the fictional courtroom in the original Switch4 film. Bombay Shaving Company undertook to remove it from the platforms within its control and to submit a revised version. On September 17 the court recorded that the takedown had been complied with, while Gillette raised objections to the new creative. Nothing in those proceedings settles the larger question of blade compatibility, or of consumer choice.

A week earlier, on September 10, the same court issued an interim restraint in Beco's matter, having found that the campaign prima facie conveyed that HUL's products could cause skin-related problems. An interim order is precisely what its name declares it to be, and should not be read as a final determination on the products or the ingredients themselves.

Mark the difference between the two. Switch4's proposition is one of fit and availability, and the dispute concerns the creative through which it was communicated. Beco's proposition touched ingredients, and with them the inference a buyer might draw about safety. In each case the question is threefold: what does the advertisement say; what does it imply; and can the implication be supported?

The abuse of words

Here is the nub, and it is older than either dispute. People are persuaded by words long before they are persuaded by things. Where the appeal is borrowed from a rival's disadvantage rather than from one's own merit, the buyer has been moved, but he has not been informed.

Raj Krishnan Shankar, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Director at the Great Lakes Institute of Management (Gurgaon), holds that how a company competes may signify as much as what it sells.

"Greatness does not come from belittling another," he says. Comparative advertisements, "especially ones that selectively pick the competitor's weaknesses," are to his mind "not indicative of leadership or strategy," but "a reflection of opportunistic behaviour or desperation." Such campaigns may yield spikes in attention and sales, yet "rarely build character." And: "The greatest of ad campaigns that we remember have never been comparative ones."

Cheek and humour fare no better in his account. Done repeatedly, he says, it "reflects poor character, insecurity." He cites the old exchanges between Apple and Microsoft, and between The Times and The Hindu, as having left him no memorable impression — and sets against them a Zomato hoarding on the subject of admission to the IIMs, which he calls "a cheekier and cleverer use of advertisement and communication abilities." These are his judgments on character and craft, not a finding on how all such campaigns perform.

The distinction is finer than humour versus aggression. A comparison may make a genuine difference visible, and that is a service. The fault enters when the campaign ceases to be about the thing sold and becomes about the rival — when the buyer is asked to think chiefly of another company's product, and is moved less by understanding than by the pleasure of seeing a large name made small.

Choice without clarity is not choice

'Consumer choice' bears two senses, and they are not the same. It may mean that alternatives exist. It may mean that a person has enough accurate information to weigh them. Switch4 speaks to the first; Beco's campaign speaks to the second. The worth of either depends on the accuracy with which it is stated.

For it is one thing to name an ingredient, another to explain its office, and a third to establish what it does under particular conditions. Claims of irritation, or of any other consequence to health, require evidence proper to that kind of claim. A claim of compatibility, likewise, is to be distinguished from a broader assertion about a competitor's products or business practices.

The interests here are less opposed than the litigation makes them appear. The challenger requires room to set an alternative before the public. The incumbent requires a fair occasion to contest what misrepresents it. The buyer requires that the exchange between them clarify rather than obscure. Neither a company's size nor its posture as challenger determines whether a particular claim is true. That is settled by evidence, and by nothing else.

Attention is not success

A small brand that takes on a familiar one will be noticed. But notice is not purchase, and publicity proves nothing except publicity. Did buyers understand the difference? Did they try the alternative? Did they return to it? Did the campaign build trust, or only conversation? These are answerable questions, and they are answered by awareness, sales and repeat-purchase figures — not by the volume of the argument.

The same holds for the established company. Defending a name is legitimate. But over any length of time, the reply to competition is made in the product and in the buyer's experience of it, and not only in court. The proceedings dispose of particular disputes about particular advertisements. They do not determine whether a campaign worked, nor whether a proposition was sound.

What the buyer gains

These two cases show that competition is carried on in several places at once: in the product, in the business model, in the advertisement, and in the rules governing commercial speech. A market that leaves no room to question what is established makes alternatives hard to see. A market in which no claim may be challenged leaves buyers uncertain what they have been told. Openness and credibility must be preserved together; either alone is of little use to anyone.

So for the challenger, the question is how to make an alternative compelling on its own merits. For the incumbent, it is how to defend its products while allowing that settled practice may be questioned. For the consumer, the measure is whether the whole contest has left her better informed than it found her.

The end of competition is not that one brand should appear different from another. It is that the difference should be real — and that a person should be given sound reasons to judge it for herself.