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Communication Strategies to Respond to Criticisms against Controversial Advertising: Evidences from Thailand Suwichit (Sean) Chaidaroon, University of Sydney, Australia Kawpong Polyorat, Khon Kaen University, Thailand Abstract This paper argues that there are occasions where controversial advertising benefit marketers, consumers, and publics at large. Yet, controversial advertising may also result in negative consequences. Therefore, marketers who decide to use controversial ads in their campaign need to be prepared to respond to unexpected situation. Consequently, the paper discusses legitimisation of controversial ads. It also presents Image Restoration Strategies marketers can use to justify their use of controversial ads followed by some illustrative cases from Thailand. Finally, questions for future research on this topic are provided. Introduction Controversial advertisements have been more and more pervasive in the market these days. Marketers may deliberately or unintentionally make their advertisements controversial. When ads are deliberately created to be controversial, the intent of marketers is most likely to gain attention from the targeted audience and bring up positive results. However, when the ads are unintentionally controversial, they can lead to unintended negative consequences which may be harmful to organisational reputation. Moreover, there might be times when marketers are intentional in making their campaigns moderately controversial but their ads result in unintended negative consequences as marketers cannot control the controversy. As a result, people who receive the message from the campaigns find the ads too offensive. Therefore, it is important for organisations to be able to handle the situation effectively when responding to such situations. It is important to note in the first place that the definitions of controversial and offensive advertisements differ. Waller (2005) defines controversial ads as “advertising that, by the type of product or execution, can elicit reactions of embarrassment, distaste, disgust, offence, or outrage from a segment of the population when presented” (p. 7). Controversial ads, in this sense, can lead to either positive or negative consequences as a result of extreme emotional response they elicit from the receivers. Offensive ads, on the other hand, include only those that result in negative consequences and therefore are subsets of controversial ads. Studies on both controversial and offensive advertising have gained attention from marketing scholars. Previous literature has addressed issues including factors influencing controversial ads (Beard, 2008; Fam, Waller, & Erdogan, 2004; Waller, 2007), culture and controversial ads (Chan et. al., 2007; Fam & Waller, 2003), perceptions of audience towards offensive ads, and response to controversial ads (Waller, 2005; Waller & Polonsky, 1996). Waller (2005), in particular, proposed a response model for controversial ads. His model depicted the interaction process starting from the audience being exposed to the ads as well as their mental and physical responses to the ads. Waller’s model provided a good basis for studying responses for controversial ads as it helped us understand the process from the audience perspective but it did not discuss communication strategies to handle situations where message receivers found the controversial ads offensive. 1 Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to start a preliminary discussion on how organisations should communicate with publics to legitimise their use of controversial ads especially when those ads appear to offend the unintended audience. This topic is important and relevant to marketers and public relations practitioners who have to work together to restore the image of their organisations as the controversial ads they have created may be considered a crisis situation the organisations have to handle. The paper, therefore, proposes that communication strategies used during crisis situations from literature in the Communication Studies discipline can benefit marketers in such situations. The paper first presents legitimisation of controversial ads. Then a typology of communication strategies is discussed as a way to respond to controversial ads followed by cases of controversial ads in Thailand to illustrate the use of communication response strategies. Finally, future research direction is provided. Legitimising Studies on Handling Criticisms against Controversial Ads To discuss effective strategies that can be used to legitimise controversial ads itself is a controversial topic. This line of work may be questioned because it may lead to an assumption that marketers and/or public relations practitioners only try to “spin” the fact and restore the organization’s image unethically. However, this paper argues that the effective handling of accounts against controversial ads is sometimes necessary. In many occasions, it is appropriate and ethical for organisations to repair their images after their use of controversial advertising if the ad has been well researched and the intention is well justified. Therefore, this section presents a legitimisation of controversial ads by discussing the unavoidable causes of offensiveness and dialectical tensions that marketers have to face when creating advertisement campaigns. Waller (2005) posits that controversial ads can be used effectively to “cut through the clutter” and given that this type of ads does not always result in negative consequences, marketers therefore have the right to use this type of advertisement in their campaign as long as they are responsible and are capable of handling the consequences of their ads. Causes of Controversy When controversial ads become offensive to certain groups of people, it is also important to acknowledge the causes of offensiveness or identify why people perceive those ads as controversial. The sense of being offended can be caused by at least three reasons. First, unintentional ignorance may lead marketers or advertisers to create advertisements that are sensitive to certain groups of people. This usually happens in the case of international advertising where cultural norms are different. Advertisers may have done their research on cultural backgrounds of the targeted audience but it is sometimes beyond the control of human beings to know everything about every culture. Second, the fact that we cannot please everyone makes it hard for advertisers to create advertising that is acceptable to every single person. This is often the case, for example, when marketers try to persuade younger generations using sex appeal or violence while the older generations find the ads very offensive. Third, related to the second point, there are always people not targeted in the ad campaigns who are exposed to the message in the ads (Waller, 2005). Finally, the products, services, or topics of ads themselves could be sensitive by their nature such as condom ads. These reasons suggest that the antagonistic responses from people who feel offended from controversial ads are sometimes beyond the control of advertisers who have tried to be careful and responsible in creating their advertising campaigns. 2 Even though this paper supports that there are legitimate usages of controversial advertisings, there are times when marketers or advertisers go beyond the acceptable line intentionally and selfishly use controversial advertisement only for their own benefits. In that case, it is believed that no communication strategies can be used to protect the organisations as the evidence of irresponsibility will speak for itself. It is the aim of this paper to start a discussion on protecting the good use of controversial advertising. Referring to the definition of controversial ads presented earlier, we can see that as extreme emotion is elicited, the campaign may result in positive or negative outcomes. An appropriate use of controversial ads is evident, for example, in many social marketing campaigns where fear appeal is used to scare audience and prevent them from certain behaviours such as using disgusting pictures of inner organs of people who smoked, had HIV, or other diseases. In these situations, marketers have to find the appropriate level of scare tactics they should use in their campaigns. As such, the merit of controversial advertising exists and its appropriate use is justified. The act of balancing opposite points in creating controversial ads is what this paper would call dialectical tensions in controversial marketing. Obviously, one dialectical tension between being creative and conforming to the societal norms and regulations complicates the work of marketers when they to use controversial advertising. On the one hand, marketers intend to be creative to gain the audience attention while on the other hand they have to conform to societal norms and regulations so that their ads appear to be acceptable by the community and regulators. Another dialectical tension is concerned with the level of information marketers should provide in their campaigns ranging from providing not enough information to giving too much information. This issue may cause problems as not providing enough information can be seen as deceiving the audience while providing too much information may result in information overload and/or audience feeling overwhelmed and/or insulted. These two dialectical tensions coupled with the reasons why offensiveness is unavoidable demonstrates that it is hard for organisations that employ controversial advertising to not offend people at all even though those organisations may have conducted their thorough marketing research prior to ad release with a good intention. Therefore, it is important that responsible marketers who plan to use controversial ads are equipped with skills and strategies to deal with criticisms from the unintended ad receivers who find their ads offensive. Crisis Response Strategies for Responding to Criticisms against Controversial Ads In the Communication discipline, studies on crisis communication have gained more and more attention from both academicians and practitioners (Coombs, 2005). Literature in this area covers a wide range of crises such as natural disaster, product recalls, organisational misconduct, workplace accidents, technical breakdowns, rumours, violence etc. (Coombs, 2007). Interestingly, how organisations respond to complaints about controversial and/or offensive ads is relevant to studies on crisis communication but not much as been done to bridge the gap between these two disciplines. Similar to many crisis situations, organisations that have been accused of using offensive ad can turn this crisis into opportunities if they justify their practice effectively to antagonistic audiences. 3 Image Restoration Strategies Among theories and frameworks that are used to study crisis communication and employed by practitioners to respond to crises, Benoit’s Image Restoration Strategies (Benoit, 1995) is commonly cited. In his framework, Benoit developed five main strategies for organisations to respond to a crisis including denial, evading responsibility, reducing offensiveness, corrective action, and mortification. Denial is used to communicate that crisis has not happened or that the organisation is not responsible for the blame. Evading responsibility can be used when organisations want to minimise their responsibility to the situation probably by showing that the situation is beyond their control or that their actions were done with a good intent. Reducing offensiveness can be used to ease the feeling of harm or illness that the audiences experience in the crisis. Corrective action is used when the organisation promises that the similar crisis will not happen again as they put some preventative actions into practice. Mortification is used when the organisation admits that the crisis is their fault and asks for forgiveness form publics.1 It is worth noting that these strategies can be used in combination with one another in a given situation. At the same time, the perception of audience on the severity of issue and whether or not the organisation is directly responsible for the crisis must be taken into consideration when selecting strategies to deal with crises. In the case of controversial advertising, it is most likely that antagonistic audiences would see that organisations who launch the ads must take full responsibility for the controversy. Therefore, the audiences’ perception on the organisation’s responsibility and the severity of the issue are probably the main factors that marketers need to pay attention to when applying these image restoration strategies to respond to criticisms against their ads. . Evidences from Thailand Investigating controversial ads from different cultures can be especially intriguing as different cultures operate based on different norms. As such, controversial and offensive ads from some cultures can offer insights into the ways organisations can respond to their antagonistic audiences who find their ads offensive. Thai advertising is arguably among the most developed and sophisticated in Southeast Asia (Paull, 2006) and reflects the country’s unique cultural values (Punyapiroje & Morrison, 2007). Chaisuwan (2003), in particular, studied unacceptable advertising in Thailand and found that the common unacceptable ads in Thailand include falsification/puffery, inappropriate advertising based on the context of Thai society, and advertising that has a negative impact on the target group. In this section, examples of unacceptable advertising in Thailand are used to illustrate how image restoration strategies can be employed after the ads are found controversial or offensive. In a case of advertisement that is proven false from the promise it has given, Lipon F, a dish detergent, advertised that this product had no smell left on the plates as well as no remaining cleaning agents. Later an analysis showed that the detergent certainly left no smell but there were still remaining agents and thus the advertisement was proven false. In this case, the company argued that the remaining cleaning agents were not in the amount that would cause any harm to human bodies and thus all consumers needed not worry about its effects. This demonstrated the use of reducing offensiveness, as the company tried to show the audiences that the harm was not as serious as it may appear. This case seemed to be somewhat effectively handle given that the company used scientific information to prove that the 4 remaining agents were not harmful coupled with the nature of Thai people who tended to forget and forgive easily. Other examples include advertisements that go against Thai values through actions, words, or executions. For example, a TV ad of toothpaste employed a well-respected University lecturer to endorse that if you used this toothpaste, you would not feel pain on your teeth. In Thai language, the word pain in this case is also the same word as reaching orgasm. This ad was then criticized widely by the publics for using inappropriate language especially as a university lecturer was used as its testimony. Another example was a detergent ad that used novices in their storyline. This ad showed that novices or young monks who used this detergent got brighter robes. In Thailand, religion is highly respected and using religion for a commercial purpose is considered against the societal norm. For the most part, when these types of controversial ads are criticized, Thai marketers usually apologise subtly to the publics and probably adjust or withdraw their ads to maintain the organisations’ reputation, demonstrating the use of mortification and corrective action as the marketers admitted the blame and tried to take action to fix the problem. In many Western crisis textbooks, it is usually suggested that organisations not apologise and use mortification as the last resort to avoid admitting guilt and legal consequences. However in the case of offensive ads, the use of mortification after the ads that appear to be offensive is commonly used probably because ads viewers perceive that negative consequences are direct action of the organisations and thus they must take full responsibility for the situation. Avoiding mortification tends to intensify the feeling of those who feel offended and make situations harder for the organisations to handle. Conclusion and Implications for Future Research In summary, this paper has argued that there are occasions when controversial advertising is legitimate and necessary as long as marketers are responsible its usages and consequences. Controversial ads do not always lead to negative consequence but the undesirable outcomes are sometimes unavoidable. As such, marketers need to be equipped with communication strategies, or Image Restoration Strategies as presented in this paper, to deal with antagonistic audiences for such unexpected situations. This paper only provided a preliminary discussion and served as a starting point for this line of research. More empirical studies and cases are needed for investigation. In particular, scholars and practitioners need to consider the following questions in order to better employ controversial ads and to respond to situations when their ads turn offensive to people. 1. What are the factors that contribute to the success and failure of using crisis response strategies in dealing with criticisms against controversial ads? 2. How can the image restorations strategies be used to respond to criticisms against controversial ads ethically and responsibly? 3. How can image restoration strategies be used to respond to offensive ads accounts in different cultures? 4. What are the nature of relevant stakeholders in controversial & offensive ads especially victims, general consumers, regulators? How do they respond to offensive ads differently? Through more comprehensive empirical studies and cases, it is hoped that marketers can justify their use of controversial ads to publics more effectively and responsibly. 5 Footnote According to Benoit, these five strategies also include their subsets but for the purpose of this paper only the five broad ones are introduced as they already provide sufficient guidelines for our discussion. 1 References Beard, F. K. (2008). How products and advertising offend consumers. Journal of Advertising Research, 48(1), 13-21. Benoit, W. L. (1995). Accounts, excuses, and apologies: A theory of image restoration strategies. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Chaisuwan, B. (2003). Unacceptable advertising within Thai society. Journal of Communication Arts, 21(1), 79-95. Chan, K., Li, L., Diehl, S., & Terlutter, R. (2007). Consumers’ response to offensive advertising: A cross cultural study. International Marketing Review, 24, 606-628. Coombs, W. T. (2005). Crisis communication. In R. L. Heath (Ed.), Encyclopedia of public relations (pp. 221-224). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Coombs, W. T. (2007). Ongoing crisis communication: Planning, managing, and responding (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fam, K. S., & Waller, D. S. (2003). Advertising controversial products in the Asia Pacific: What makes them offensive? Journal of Business Ethics, 48, 237-250. Fam, K. S., Waller, D. S., & Erdogan, B. Z. (2004). The influence of religion on attitudes towards the advertising of controversial products. European Journal of Marketing, 38, 537555. Paull, G. (2006). Ad Industry: Industry analysis. The advertising book 2006. Bangkok: Bangkok Publisher. Punyapiroje, C., & Morrison, M. A. (2007). Behind the smile: Reading cultural values in Thai advertising. Asian Journal of Communication, 17, 318-336. Waller, D. S. (2005). A proposed response model for controversial advertising. Journal of Promotion Management, 11(2/3), 3-15. Waller, D. S. (2007). Consumer offense towards the advertising of some gender-related products. Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction, and Complaining Behavior, 20, 72-85. Waller, D. S., & Polonsky, M. J. (1996). Advice for handling controversial accounts: From products to politicians. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 14(3), 21-28. 6