Amul milk does a star turn with Bhaag Milkha Bhaag and Sheryl Sandberg’s PR selfie gets bad press

 11th July 2013    Good and Bad PR 

Bollywood comes up with some of the best communications campaigns. The latest has Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation’s Amul Milk in a co-promotional tie up. The story goes that the ‘Flying Sikh’, Milkha Singh, the subject of the movie, ‘Bhaag Milkha Bhaag’, ran his first cross country race to win the prize of a glass of milk.

This story is what the campaign centres on, positioning milk as the original energy drink, riding on the inspiring story of the legendary runner Milkha Singh. Watch, the video here. It does make milk look cool.

This is not the first time that Amul, already well known for the iconic Amul girl ads, has gone for a sports or movie tie up. They sponsored the Indian contingent for the London Olympics last year and tied up for the launch of ‘Man of Steel’ Iast month.

Van Heusen asks you to vote for the most fashionable professional on LinkedIn

Do you have a fashionable contact or colleague on LinkedIn? Well, Van Heusen, known for its line of office clothes, has created an app, which let you log into your LinkedIn account to vote for the person you consider the most fashionable professional. Each nomination gets you Rs. 500/- off on a Van Heusen purchase and 5 top men and women winners will get vouchers of Rs. 25,000/- each.

The choice of LinkedIn, rather than Facebook or Twitter for a consumer company is interesting, but makes sense as it ties in the core values of the brand with the social platform selected.

Take a look at the app to vote for your fashion plate colleague.

Bad PR

Sheryl Sandberg self-PR during a crisis is distasteful PR.

Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg’s public statement saying that she and her family just missed being on the  Asiana Airlines flying from Seoul, South Korea that crashed at the San Francisco International Airport, has been slammed as distasteful.

When a person is as public as Sheryl Sandberg and in the middle of a major book promotion to boot, questions will be raised about the sensitivity of such a statement. Though I don’t believe, there was a deep and dark plan to ride on the publicity around the crash, it was certainly ill timed and would have worked better if it was in response to a question about her welfare. It would have also have helped if Sandberg had expressed concern for all the passengers in her initial status updates.

Colour me bad

Also worth a mention in this week’s examples of bad PR is the media machine Tesco, after the supermarket giant was forced to pull a 16-page colouring book from its shelves. Why? Well, because instead of fluffy bunnies and cute kittens, kids were being encouraged to colour in images of knives, blood and screaming victims, including scenes from Psycho, Fatal Attraction, Misery (you know, where she smashes his knees to pieces with a hammer?) and The Silence of the Lambs (which, coincidentally, has nothing much to do with lambs). The book was called “Colour Me Good – Arrggghhhh!!” Nothing screams “How to turn your child into a serial killer” much louder than that.

Have you seen any great or even bad PR?

Write to Paarul Chand at paarul@prmoment.in or tweet @PaarulC or @PRmomentIndia throughout the week and we’ll happily credit you for your trouble.