How Vicks Put A Legal Argument Inside A Film About A Mother
Vicks released Touch of Care in March 2017, and it is not really about a cold rub. The film follows Gauri Sawant, a transgender woman, and Gayatri, the orphaned child she raised, told from the daughter's point of view.
Brand: Vicks, from Procter and Gamble
Agency: Publicis Singapore
Director: Neeraj Ghaywan, with SeeOn producing
Released in late March 2017, with sources differing by a day on the date
Sawant was later named the first recipient of a fund the brand set up
What Vicks Was Actually Claiming
That care is what makes a parent, which is a sentimental line in most contexts and a legal position in this one. The film's weight comes from the gap between how the household functions and how it is recognised.
The brand platform is the connective tissue. A product associated for generations with a mother looking after a sick child can make an argument about who counts as a mother without the argument feeling imported.
Why It Avoided The Usual Failure
Purpose advertising generally fails by making the brand the hero of somebody else's difficulty. This film does not do that: the product appears briefly, the brand does not resolve anything, and the story belongs to the people in it.
Telling it from the daughter's perspective is the decision that holds the whole thing up. It removes any possibility of the film explaining a marginalised adult to an audience, because the narrator is simply describing her mother.
What It Established And What It Did Not
It established that an Indian mass brand could take a position on a contested social question and be rewarded rather than boycotted, which was not obvious before it ran.
It did not establish that doing so is safe. The work is quoted constantly and copied rarely, and the brands quoting it have mostly chosen subjects with no opposition attached, which is the opposite of what this film did.
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