‘Disparaging’ a category is actionable: HUL tells court

The lawyers for Hindustan Unilever Ltd argued in the Bombay High Court on Friday that Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd’s (GCMMF) ads were guilty of disparaging frozen desserts.

The maker of Kwality Walls ice-cream argued that identifying a particular brand of company by name was not necessary for the ad to be guilty of “general disparagement.”

Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd had earlier said its Amul ice-cream ads did not hurt Kwality Walls because they did not refer to it by name, rather depicting a generic cup labelled “frozen dessert”.

HUL’s counsel, senior advocate Virag Tulzapurkar, cited case law from the Delhi, , Calcutta, and Madras High Courts whose benches had previously ruled that a company could be guilty of showing a product in poor light even if it did not include a competitor’s name, by emulating its packaging or by attacking the entire class of products that it is sold in.

In the arguments, it was revealed that HUL and GCMMF had exchanged emails on the ads that Amul ran, where HUL had asked the company to stop airing that Kwality Walls was made with vanaspati or hydrogenated vegetable oil. However, Tulzapurkar argued that Amul’s change in the ads, from vanaspati to vanaspati tel was not enough.

“The effect of that change is zero because the image from the first ad is fixed in public mind.”

The matter has been adjourned to Monday.