Crisis communication has changed in the digital age. Why organizations are still doing it the old way, which is one-way?

Amplification without empathy is not communication. It’s talking past people until they stop listening.

There is one strange, perhaps interesting thing about my work profile: over the years, without trying to, I have kind of been called for a lot of crisis communication issues. It’s not an area where I try to ever build my brand or something, but just pure word of mouth, right from Crisis Comm workshops for government bodies, including the National Disaster Relief Foundation, to corporates and PSUs. I have done these workshops.

Coincidentally, now with AI and GTM becoming more important, I try and focus more on these, but Crisis Comm has still remained an area of interest.

In that context of surprise, when one of the best marketing teams in the country and arguably also in the world -BJP, has messed up the recent strategy to this extent.

BJP has been great at identifying the ICP-catering to it, making sure that the marketing is much louder than the product. And clearly defining a brand and a narrative across platforms.

But this time they have got it very wrong. They’ve launched a full 360° campaign after the recent GenZ protest:

👉 Hoardings in cities promoting their position

👉 YouTube videos with characters lecturing Gen Z about “proper” language

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👉 Celebrities and influencers posting about linguistic correctness

It’s coordinated. It’s expensive.

It’s tone-deaf!

This isn’t complicated crisis management.

The mistake isn’t the amplification itself — it’s that every channel is designed to tell rather than listen. No engagement with why people are upset. No acknowledgment of the real grievance. Just more volume.

Social media doesn’t reward that anymore. You can’t outshout a two-way conversation. The harder you push your message without acknowledging the other side exists, the more the algorithm amplifies the pushback.

The spend context makes this worse.

Government marketing expenditure is now running into thousands of crores annually — significantly higher than previous governments. So at the exact moment when people have just got back after ITR filing, this spend itself will become a public friction point. Why launch another visible, expensive, multiplatform campaign to defend a position- especially when some other tactics seem to have worked in silencing the critics?

For a smart PR-Media - Marketing team, this is quite surprising. I sincerely hope they get it right.

Meanwhile, smaller players —like this dental clinic playing this well.

This one is brilliant. Imagine a dentist going viral by just posting one piece of content. Very smart.

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-Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/

What’s your take? Join the conversation on my LinkedIn.

P.S. a lot of content online is talking about what makes this particularly frustrating: it’s happening at a moment when there are far bigger issues competing for government attention, from the big ones to little kids starving -click here. as you can see in the comments, it’s even upsetting die-hard BJP supporters