Flipkart Said Happy Women’s Day but It Was a Branding Fail!

Have you noticed how the posts that we see for women on Women’s Day usually have to do with their roles as a good mother, daughter, sister etc.? They are about how supportive and self-sacrificing women are – because apparently, that is what they are supposed to be, to be considered ‘ideal women’. Flipkart decided to say Happy Women’s Day, but also fell into that same trap of stereotyping women and limiting their spheres of activity.

Here we are ‘celebrating’ women with… discounted kitchen appliances. This is such a branding fail! To be clear, this does not hurt the sentiments of women; we just wish Flipkart would try to have a more progressive view.

The brand seems to be ‘celebrating’ women by telling them that their place is in the kitchen.

If the Flipkart brand wanted to appeal to the female demographic it pretty much failed with this stereotypical promotion... Because some women were clearly offended.  

This mindset is only reflective of what societal beliefs are in general; the sort of misogynistic drivel that many of our leaders espouse.

Many men feel this way, offering the explanation that women are somehow endowed with abilities that make them especially suited to cooking and caring duties. By saying they are ‘better’ than men in this way, they basically ensure that it is the women who will have to continue performing these duties.

The conditioning starts early. Women are brought up with the expectation of caregiving. It isn't a special ability but learned behaviour based on social and familial expectations. Saying that women do what they do because of some ‘superpower’ is nothing but a copout.   The inference is that since men would not be 'as good' at these duties, they are absolved of responsibilities in this domain. 

This is a valid argument, given that many women are still very much in subordinate roles in their own homes; expected to make do within the confines of a limited budget. Given that homemakers are still overwhelmingly female, this promotion could actually work for a lot of women; so the objection to Flipkart's promotion is actually elitist.

Flipkart tendered an apology that they ‘messed up’ and for that perennial problem, ‘hurt sentiments’. To be clear, women don’t want an apology for ‘hurt sentiments’; merely the acknowledgement that working in the kitchen is not just for women. All adults should be able to look after themselves without expecting other adults to look after them. However, the fact is that most males expect to be looked after and waited on and cooked for by the women in their homes…probably why Women’s Day is still a thing.

Women are appreciated for being beautiful, for cooking well, keeping a clean house, for keeping in-laws happy, for being dutiful and self-sacrificing wives and mothers. So such posts are par for the course on Women's Day.

Some women do succeed despite all odds in a man’s world, which is undoubtedly heroic. The point here is, that it is still very much a man’s world. Successful women are still the exception and not the rule… simply because women don’t have the sort of opportunities or the agency that men have.

Apart from the usual posts eulogizing women as mother/wife/daughter, I received this forward on WhatsApp yesterday. This is actually what women are hoping for – to be valued as individuals, not as adjuncts to the men in our lives. We want to un-hyphenate ourselves from our assigned supporting roles to the male leads in our lives. We don’t want to be lauded for our ‘sacrifices’ and our ability to multitask. We would rather not be put in positions where those sacrifices were required in the first place. And that is precisely why the Flipkart promo was a branding fail.