A 24 carat gold ice cream: To tickle your taste buds or prick your conscience?

The golden ice cream that created a lot of buzz on social media. Photo: Hotel Sarina.

Hotel Sarina is a 5 star hospitality and cuisine establishment that just celebrated its 19th anniversary. And to mark the occasion, the hotel went all out with its social media blitz and offered an outrageously expensive ice cream - in addition to a one-night stay in their imperial suite for a whopping Tk1 lakh.

This concocted quite a lot of buzz everywhere, especially on social media. But one would be hard pressed to find any trace of it now. The original post for the 24 carat golden ice cream cannot be found anywhere on Facebook. All that can be found, at the time of writing this article, is a follow-up post that doesn't allow commenting, announcing that the package deal has been overbooked and that they are not taking any more reservations.

That particular post has way more engagement than anything else on their Facebook page and if you take a closer look, you can see that the engagement of the post almost went international with many non-Bangalee names that did not react favourably to the gilded ice cream deal.

This isn't the first time an extravagant offer like this was made for the wealthy elite of Bangladesh. Back in 2018, Amari Dhaka announced a Valentine's Day package for roughly Tk11,38,500. That particular offer got lampooned on social media and engendered a lot of bewilderment from all quarters, except the wealthy.

In the aftermath, the Six Seasons Hotel's director Kazi Aaquib Shams penned an opinion piece explaining how Amari made more from the social media engagement on that post than the package itself.

Fast forward to 2022. The world is in the grips of a global recession anew and inflation is at the forefront of every working person's mind. The only salient question here is how intentional was Hotel Sarina's campaign?

After all there is no such thing as bad publicity. For all intents and purposes, Hotel Sarina has achieved its goal. They became the talk of the town, for however brief, and clearly managed to obtain the sales volume they were aiming for according to their statement that they are overbooked.

The Business Standard reached out multiple times to obtain some background information and commentary about the social media reaction, but no answers were forthcoming.

A business that has been running for almost 20 years needs to find a way to stay relevant and retain their customer base, sure. Nothing drives social media infamy more than monetary excess and unattainable objects and experiences. The case can be made that this particular marketing campaign was designed to get the reaction that it did. And unlike Amari's blunder from back in the day, which got dragged by its rivals through their own social media posts, Sarina's marketing team kept a vice-like grip on the traction it was generating.

From a passing glance at the post it appears that the hotel is selling an ice cream for Tk1 lakh, but only upon further perusal does it become apparent that it comes with a one night stay and breakfast in bed in their imperial suite. Had the marketing team decided to lead with that specific bit of information, the outrage would not have reached the crescendo that it did.

Every widely inhabited region of the country is feeling the pain of the inflation squeeze and, to put it succinctly, the advertisement does come off as tone deaf to people who are living paycheck to paycheck, which, if you look at the figures, are the vast majority of the workforce.

There are other ways to make an unnecessarily expensive dish, like adding summer truffles (most people are unaware that summer truffles are looked down upon by the wealthy), which Sarina did specifically to get as many eyeballs as they can. All major news outlets covered this, so they got even more traction on top of the already massive social media impact they had. Legacy media outlets got handed press releases and covered this without a hint of irony or even commenting on the tone deaf nature of said press releases.

"Today we brought you something which is simple but very popular, with a different perspective and super value added - Guess what! - Ice cream. We all have tried sorbet, gelato, kulfi, frozen yoghurt, etc in the city however, our offering is really different; it is 24 carats golden ice cream. We all have seen GOLD as jewellery. It is said that this Noble metal has nutritional value too; it is a source of magnesium, calcium, a few vitamins, zinc, copper, and selenium."

A basic google search or even the preliminary application of common sense will reveal that is not the case at all. All this is just an extravagant way to show people that inflation doesn't affect everyone.

If anything, the timing of this offer proves that the wealth gap is bigger than anyone of us could have imagined. Bangladeshi taka makes up the eighth largest deposit in Swiss banks. We are one of the poorest countries in the world; you can bristle at that claim but all you need to look at is the exchange rate.

Hotel Sarina specifically used every aforementioned tactic with wilful intent to first, goad the have-nots into freaking out about the offer, which leads to the second point, the hubbub around it was so much that the wealthy scrambled to book the offer and it was sold out within 24 hours. Hotel Sarina got to have its cake and eat it too.

There is no way to confirm this, but any social media metrics analyst will tell you that Sarina made back its anniversarial sunk costs within the span of 24 hours just due to the level of interactions people were having with their original post. Hotel Sarina's mindshare is back at the top of the hotel industry. And all of us, including this article to a certain extent, is culpable for giving them the traction that allowed their ludicrous offer to be sold out.

Sketch: TBS

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.