Word on the Street — Containing a Marketplace Rumor at Tulsi Naturals

A four-round, advanced digital-marketing and brand-crisis simulation set inside Tulsi Naturals Pvt. Ltd., a Pune-based direct-to-consumer wellness brand (FY25 revenue ₹220 crore, 68% via marketplaces, 1.9 million customers) whose entire moat is organic word-of-mouth: its hero cold-pressed coconut oil carries 41,000 reviews at 4.6 stars and drives 31% of revenue. In June 2026 a consumer with 120,000 followers posts an unverified video claiming an unnamed lab found mineral-oil adulteration in the hero SKU. Within 72 hours rumor reach hits 2.4 million impressions (doubling daily), 380 new 1- and 2-star reviews crash net sentiment from +71 to +12, hero-SKU conversion falls from 6.8% to 4.1%, the marketplace algorithm quietly demotes the listing, and ₹1.7 crore a month begins bleeding out. Playing the head of digital marketing, you contain the spreading rumor and steer word-of-mouth before the sales-decline timer runs out, controlling a live ₹1.65 crore (165 lakh) monthly budget. The simulation is built on Subin Sudhir's research on word-of-mouth and online-review ambiguity: ambiguity, not just negativity, drives consumer anxiety, so the winning response reduces ambiguity with credible evidence and amplifies genuine customer voices rather than out-shouting the rumor. Round 1: diagnose the crisis as a genuine scare, a coordinated attack, or ambiguous unresolved noise; locate the two super-spreader channels carrying ~80% of the spread; recognize the algorithmic demotion compounding the loss; and choose how fast to intervene on the doubling curve. Round 2: choose a response posture (silence, factual rebuttal, empathetic evidence-based engagement, or aggressive legal correction), design the genuine-WOM amplification play, answer the journalist inside the 72-hour window, and pre-commit to the line you will not cross — manufacturing fake reviews. Round 3: allocate the full ₹1.65 crore across paid media, advocates, community/rapid-response, PR and a lab fact-sheet, and a contingency reserve, with explicit kill/scale triggers and the correct sequencing of trust repair before paid amplification. Round 4: respond to a week-2 complication and the precautionary-banner threat, re-balance toward what is working, define a post-crisis WOM-resilience playbook, and pitch the CEO on all four KPIs and the net revenue saved. The scoring tracks four KPIs — net sentiment, rumor reach, hero-SKU conversion, and campaign ROI — and uses sticky run-defining penalties: astroturfing (a fake-review drive) trips fraud detection and suspends the listing, caps conversion and ROI and burns the moat; strategic silence lets reach explode and the banner go up; spending paid media on a still-distrusted listing pins ROI below 1×; and dismissing genuine worried buyers as a coordinated smear blocks the advocate mobilization. Each of the five classic errors measurably underperforms, and the headline anti-patterns cannot reach the top verdict even when other rounds are played well.