Will Hyundai laugh thanks to Delhi Belly?

Delhi Belly is in the news again, this time for the wrong reasons. In the film, the character played by Imran Khan is presented a car, which, Hyundai Motor India says, is a Santro. One of his friends, on seeing the car, exclaims, “When a donkey f***s a rickshaw, this is what you get.” Hyundai has confirmed that they will take legal action.

The producers’ stand is that they had modified the car to ensure it does not look like any distinguishable brand.

If Hyundai was the butt of a damaging joke, imagine the reactions of Toyota executives when they saw The Other Guys.In the movie, the Toyota Prius is called “a tampon on wheels” and the driving experience called - hold your breath -“driving around in a vagina”. Couldn’t have helped the brand much and the suits at Toyota would certainly have been more livid than Hyundai execs. Watch the Prius clip.

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Closer home, we saw negative product placement in Slumdog Millionaire. In the context of the film, a Mercedes Benz is seen in a few scenes. Mercedes Benz had demanded that scenes with the car in it be deleted as the brand would suffer from association to poverty.

The film’s producers had approached Mercedes for permission to use the car. When permission was denied, all they did was to remove the Mercedes logo from the offending scene. Here’s Danny Boyle, quoted in The Times, London:

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The [thing you did not see] was the Mercedes logo on that car. We had to take that off because Mercedes don’t want to be associated with being in a slum. We wanted to use a Mercedes because . . . this guy, this gangster would drive a Mercedes . . . but if you use Mercedes then clearly you have to get permission, and we asked for their permission and they refused it.

Have the producers of Delhi Belly done enough to protect themselves legally against Hyundai by making the Santro ‘unrecognisable?’ In court, if the court decides that the car is clearly a Santro, the producers could, one would imagine, be asked to delete the derogatory remarks.

The Delhi Belly case is a fine example of unwanted product placement. If you’re hearing this for the first time and think this is new, it’s not.

Brandcameo runs a Product Placement Award - where last year’s winner for Unwanted Product Placement was Pfizer in the movie Love and Other Drugs which projects Pfizer’s business philosophy extremely negatively.

Pfizer reacted to the placement very differently from what Hyundai is doing.

A company statement said:

We were not involved in the film’s production.

We’re glad to see appropriate attention paid to the complex challenges facing Parkinson’s disease patients and their families.

Many dedicated scientists and researchers are working to find a cure and improved therapies for those living with Parkinson’s and other devastating neurodegenerative diseases, including scientists at Pfizer.

Will Hyundai go the Mercedes way and walk away with a sigh? Or act like Toyota, which actually found that the placement worked positively for the car? Or Pfizer, which transformed the negative imagery into a virtue?