Sunday, 17 January 2010

lux gold coin fraud

The omnipresent ad of (some) lux soaps containing gold coin will be pulled back. I could not find any english news report, here are Pratahkal (Hindi) and Loksatta (Marathi) reports. The two are not reporting the same thing. I guess it is better than no reporting from English media.

What I could gather from the news:
  • Ad watchers had appealed to consumer court claiming fraud by HUL.
  • HUL agreed that some language in the ad could be misleading and decided to pull the ad out and change the packaging.
  • The basic claim is that the batches that contained gold coins were out much before (manufactured before 22 Nov/10 Dec 2009) and currently running ad-campaign says that offer is valid for soaps manufactued between 5 Oct 2009 and 20 Jan 2010.
  • Appeal has been made for 2.5 Crore penalty for misleading.
Loksatta also quotes that it is illegal to advertize based on schemes involving luck (like lottery).

So many interesting things here -
  1. Win for consumer awareness
  2. How can HUL dare to violate a law, that too in marketing itself?
  3. Why is there so little reporting on news sites or blogs (The reason I am putting it up here)?
  4. Why does it take day and half more for other news sites to investigate a decently important story? Are there vested interests (unlikely that so many are together)? Or is it delay in indexing from google (again, unlikely)?

3 comments:

The Comedian said...

I think there are vested interests here. I briefly mentioned it to a friend at HUL and he was fully aware of the situation.

Unknown said...

seems so... and try to google it - no one is reporting it still.

talk about freedom of press. everyone has freedom to shut up it seems.

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