Aamir Khan is brand ambassador for Snapdeal – Snapdeal obviously got him on board because of popularity and huge fan following. When Amir Khan endorses something, the stature of the brand definitely rises a few notches.
Snapdeal has had great Diwali – Their Diwali Fest was a big hit – In first 24 hours of the sale, they received a whopping 5 million orders and they witnessed 250% rise in new user numbers.. Not only that they also received over 10,000 registrations during their Home Buying Fest.
However, a completely unrelated incidence seems to be creating major problems for Snapdeal, the app to be precise. Hundreds of users have started pulling down Snapdeal App ratings to 1 star and the reason is the Aamir Khan, their brand ambassador’s strong political statement in regards to perceived intolerance of Government.
While attending the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism award ceremony, Aamir Khan said, “Kiran and I have lived all our lives in India. For the first time, she said, should we move out of India? That’s a disastrous and big statement for Kiran to make to me. She fears for her child. She fears about what the atmosphere around us will be. She feels scared to open the newspapers everyday. That does indicate that there is a sense of growing disquiet”
He supported the #AwardWapasi campaign by various people across India stating that this was one way to get their point across.
You can check out this entire video of the interview uploaded by Indian Express on Youtube.
After these statements, hundreds and thousands of Snapdeal users, who did not like Aamir Khan making such a statement vented their anger and discontent by giving 1 star rating. Many users said that they installed Snapdeal App purely because they wanted to given then 1 star rating.
Here are some of the comments from the users.
These disgruntled users are calling it #AppWapasi and are now asking Snapdeal to remove him as their Brand Ambassador.
This event just goes to show that a brand can never be sure of what could create problems – in this case, their Brand Ambassador giving a statement completely unrelated to brand has created a headache.
Remember, App store ratings are very important and app downloads and ranking on Play store is directly related to it. If this movement grows, Snapdeal will surely have a tough problem to solve.