How Brands Reply to Poking Competitors

It was the year of 1975 when Pepsi decided to check the ground reality and make people realize that they like Pepsi more than Coca Cola. The famous campaign was called 'The Pepsi Challenge' and it was one-of-its-kind blind taste challenge. A representative would set up a booth in a mall or a shopping centre, pour two white glasses with Pepsi and Coke respectively and ask people to take a sip from both the white cups. The sweeter taste was a hit and Pepsi came with a survey insight that more Americans prefer Pepsi over Coke.

For whoever took the challenge, Pepsi representative handed them a promotional Pepsi can and a metal tab button to promote the campaign. Coke was not behind and started distributing metal badges with the text "I picked Coke in the Pepsi Challenge"

This story brings an interesting debate in marketing -- Does it pay to have a presence of mind, coupled with a sense of humour?

In this blog, we have a few marketing comebacks from competitors that stole the show and created new brand fans.

Luxury war

With this cheeky billboard, Audi challenged BMW to show that they have better cars in luxury sedan segment. Soon, BMW came with a reply and it escalated with a couple of more replies.

This was the sequence of the jabs -

Audi: Your move, BMW.

BMW: Checkmate.

Audi: Your pawn is no match for our king.

BMW: Game over.

Glass or Chalice?

Newcastle, a British based Brown Ale brewery, took a little different approach. Newcastle decided to pick on Stella Artois by exploiting the word “Chalice” used on Stella’s popular print ads that have “It’s a chalice, not a glass” written on them. The Newcastle billboard just says “Who uses the word ‘Chalice’?”, and is placed under the Stella Artois billboard. At the bottom of the pint ad, “No bollocks” phrase is written to point out that beer ads usually convey irrelevant messages.

Logistics war

Logistics and delivery competitors, FedEx and DHL, went against each other via what defines them, the trucks that do the job. FedEx creatively painted its truck and said ‘FedEx Always First’, a direct take at DHL’s brand colour.

However, DHL took the opportunity to talk about how people are fed up with the two brands - FedEx and UPS.

Burger war

Known for their dominance in the fast-food market, McDonald’s and Burger King are commonly known as forever rivals. However, McDonald’s is comparatively more widespread with a larger number of stores. The battle started when McDonald’s launched a billboard talking about how a McDonald’s brand was just 5Kms ahead while a Burger King store was 258Kms ahead.

However, Burger King wasn’t going to let it go, it launched it’s own response campaign too, crediting McDonald’s for giving its customer relief before they travel the mile to reach Burger King. These ad battles called ‘burger wars’ haven’t stopped amusing customers for a while now.

Conclusion

Brands can be very competitive at times with comparative ads. However, they are forbidden from pointing out competitor brand's flaw by explicitly mentioning brand's trademark entities such as name, slogan etc. That is why most companies target competitor brand's characteristics which are not legally registered. For example, that’s how Samsung created the “Next Big Thing Is Already Here” campaign focusing on the hype that can unmistakably be connected to its main competitor Apple iPhone and all the prejudice that accompanies it.

While a really smart comparative ad can give you good social media mileage, there's a good chance that it can backfire too. Also, comparative ads may bring attention to your competitors at your marketing expense.

Do you see comparative advertisements as a smart strategy? What is your preferred/favorite advertisement strategy? Tell us in the comment box below.

• Topic Participants

• Vinit Tibrewal

  

• Sticky Posts

• 10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales

  Congratulations! You've finally set up that e-commerce store you've been thinking about for a long time. Hopefully it wasn't too difficult. Even if it was, the effort will be totally worth it when you start seeing some orders come through. Now that the store is live, let's take a look at some marketing tips you can apply for sales growth. 1. Avoid cart abandonment If you've ever shopped online, you might have added a product to the cart but then decided not to purchase it. This is known as cart abandonment.

• Marketing in a post COVID-19 world!

  Consumers across countries are increasingly spending more time on a wide variety of digital activities, right from online grocery shopping, to video conferencing, to tele-medicine. There is a good chance that you performed one or more of the following activities during this lockdown, thanks to COVID 19: Cooked a meal Made a TikTok Video Signed up for a remote learning session Consulted a doctor online (or ordered medicines online) Shopped for groceries online A study by Hunter, a food and beverage

• Inbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy

  According to a behaviour survey, 68% of the buyers use sources such as blogs to evaluate the product even before considering it. Before buying a product, we do a lot of research to learn more about the product through communities, blogs, social media,

• How Zylker doubled their webinar registrations!

  Webinars are good educational resources to gather qualified leads for your product. But what if your visitors are dropping off from your webinar landing page without signing up? What more could you do to convert visitors into registrants? This is the

• The ideology behind why features tell, but benefits sell

  Do you think there's any truth to this? Do features only tell, and benefits sell?  Well, let's see why we should focus on benefits rather than features as the great marketing wizards, David Ogilvy and Steve Jobs proved to be the best examples leveraging

• Recent Topics

• How to Assign Record Ownership in a Custom Form via API?

  Hello everyone, I’ve created a custom form in Zoho People and I’m using the API to manage its records. I would like to know how I can assign ownership of these records to specific users via the API. Is there a specific parameter or field in the API request

• Customer Statement Template not matching when sending

  Hi everyone! So when I send statements to our customers via Zoho Books, the message that appears by default does not match what I have written on the template Under settings -> email notifications -> sales -> customer statement We have a single default

• Working with keywords

  Hello everyone, first time here so I will try to be brief. I am working on my company's data set. I have a table with all the images we have on line. For each image we hava a cell tha contains all keywords related to that image. I would like to explore

• Unlocking New Horizons: A Year in Review

  As we bid farewell to 2024, let's celebrate and revisit the key highlights of the year. From adding a new edition to cross-platform enhancements, here’s a roundup of all the feature updates designed to simplify accounting, optimize financial management,

• Peppol Malaysia API

  Hi Zoho Books, my country Malaysia will going to implement "Peppol" (E-Invoicing), starting 1 Jul 2025 for all businesses. The government intends to provide API for accounting app. The workflow involves creating an invoice from accounting app, triggers

• Re-emitir facturas con nueva dirección de facturación

  Hola, necesito saber si es posible que las facturas ya emitidas, pueden ser re-emitidas con el cambio de dirección de facturación, realizado el día de hoy 02-01-2025, para efectos contables. Espero su ayuda, Gracias

• Zoho Learn vs. Trainer Central

  Hi, I'm currently using Zoho One with a WordPress-based website and WooCommerce to manage my online courses. I would like to know what is the difference between Zoho Learn and Trainer Central and if it's possible for these two platforms to replace WP

• Map Plan to Different Income Account for Some Subscriptions via API

  We have a plan that has a default Plan Account of "Sales". Can we override the account for a specific subscription via API? In some instances the same exact plan should map to a different income account. When we create stand-alone invoices in Zoho Books,

• Flow with CRM

  Hello, I have a simple flow that uses a web hook to enter data into a Sales Order. I have the web hook sending Flow data which has a PO field. If the PO has a special character like - or / or \ the task fails. How can I get the flow to be okay with the

• We've revised the pricing model of CRM portal user licenses

  Hello everyone, We’re making important updates to our pricing structure for portal user licenses, effective from the next payment cycle. The new slab-based pricing is as follows: Previously, these portal user licenses were priced at $5/ user/ month. As

• Chrome browser issues. Anyone else?

  I am suddenly having multiple issues with Chrome browser interpreting the Zoho Mail interface.  Anyone else?  Any known problems? Thanks, Todd

• Set another Layout as Standard

  We created a few layouts and we want to set another one to standard:

• Zoho Payroll US?

  Good morning, just reaching out today to see if there's any timeline, or if there's progress being made to bring Zoho Payroll out to be available to all states within the USA. Currently we're going through testing with zoho, and are having issues when

• Set up multiple IMAP email addresses

  Hi, I just started using CRM and its great, but I just found out I can only add one imap email address for incoming mail in the included salesinbox ...this is ridiculous. All companies have different email such as sales@domain, info@domain , personal@domain

• Function 58: Custom calculation in item table of invoices (2 fields)

  Hello everyone, and welcome back to our series! In Zoho Books, the Item Amount in invoices is calculated by multiplying the Quantity and Rate fields. Previously, we shared a function to include a custom field in this calculation. Today, we are taking

• Tracking new lead response time

  Hi, I have a team of Sales Development Reps, who have a KPI of responding to a lead within 20 mins or less once it hits the system.  I seem to recall that Zoho CRM had the capability to track this in a previous version, but don't see it anywhere.   It's

• Pushing Data from One CRM account to another.

  We have business partners that want to collaborate through the CRM. Other than pre-planned data migrations what are the options for Zoho Users to transfer data between the accounts. For instance, could I create a webhook that is sent from our CRM and then is picked up in the partner's Flow?

• Search function not working anymore

  Hi! The search function is not working anymore. How can we solve this problem?

• When converting a lead to an account, the custom mandatory fields in the account are not treated by zoho as mandatory

  In my Account module I have a number of custom fields that I have set as mandatory. When I enter a new customer as a new account they work, I can't save the record without populating them. However when I convert a lead, my CRM users are able to save the

• Expand Zia's Language Support and AI Capabilities

  Dear Zoho Desk Support, I would like to submit a feature request to improve Zia, the AI-driven support assistant in Zoho Desk. Currently, Zia only supports the English language, while other AI agents such as Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude can work with a

• get gettting the days number between two dates with deluge

  I am trying to calculate the days number between 2 specific dates but its not working. PLease help me.

• Limit excceding issue in zoho creator

  I am transferring data from Zoho Books to Zoho Creator using a Deluge script. However, I am frequently encountering a "limit exceeding error," which seems to be related to the Deluge statements limit. I reached out to Zoho Support, and they informed me

• How do I add more schedules to Zoho Creator?

  At the moment, the number of schedule calls we have in Zoho Creator are 1800 per month and I was wondering if it was possible to upgrade that amount to something higher. I'd like to know my options as well as the pricing.

• Conexion CREATOR x CRM

  Buenas tardes, Tengo un problema con un código que crea un registro en CRM. Revisé el CRM para eliminar los campos obligatorios, pero cuando ejecuto el programa, aparece el siguiente mensaje de error: {"code":"MANDATORY_NOT_FOUND","details":{"api_name":"data"},"message":"required

• Invoices with billable time and expenses

  I cannot seem to get a straight answer. We are looking to create an invoice to send to our clients, but it needs to have the following on it: 1. Billable hours for each employee. All hours for the pay period on one line, by employee. 2. Expenses for each

• Search Bar Improvement for Zoho Commerce

  Hey everyone, I've been using Zoho Commerce for a bit now, and I think the search bar could really use an upgrade. Right now, it doesn't show products in a dropdown as you type, which would make finding items a lot faster. On Shopify, for example, you

• Send Whatsapp with API including custom placeholders

  Is is possible to initiate a session on whatsapp IM channel with a template that includes params (placeholders) that are passed on the API call? This is very usefull to send a Utility message for a transactional notification including an order number

• Can't get form response to populate custom PDF template

  I've created a template and set it to default but can't figure out how to get the response to populate that template. It keeps giving me the default summary.

• Zoho Sheets not compatible with Excel/Google Sheets

  In order to share a copy of a Zoho sheet with someone that does not use Zoho, it must be downloaded as MS Excel format and then added to an email.  This is a labor intensive, and frankly confusing process.  I have forgotten to do this before, only to

• Zoho One not working

  I'm having several issues accessing Zoho One. Some pages don't load (for example, Zoho Directory) and the labels are all messed-up (oz.account.directory.display.shorname, oz.settings...., etc.)

• Add Ability to Designate Decision Branches as "Error Branches"

  Zoho Flow gives the ability to track down, troubleshoot, and fix errors with the Status and Filter dropdowns in the History tab. This works well for when a "normal" Flow action registers with an error. However, there are other times where it would be

• Visitors sending message via Whatsapp are not saving on contacts

  Visitors who sends me messages from Whatsapp when i finish the chat do not populate on contacts, how can I add them as contacts?

• ChatGPT only summarize in English

  Hello i' v enabled chatgpt in salesIQ, it works great inside conversation (revise, Rephrase etc) add tags works well with another language than English. But when I want to summarize it render only in English, despite sales IQ is set to another language.

• Brand with multiple facebooks pages

  HI, We are a small publisher that has different FaceBook pages for each of our product lines. All are within the same FB account.   Is it possible to add all of these pages to our one brand in zoho social so I orchestrate the posts between the different products?    Cheers, Joe

• How do I connect Sales IQ to Shopify

  How do I connect Sales IQ to Shopify.    

• DORA compliance

  For DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) compliance, I’ll want to check if Zoho provides specific features or policies aligned with DORA requirements, particularly for managing ICT risk, incident reporting, and ensuring operational resilience in

• Free user licenses across all Portal user types

  Greetings everyone, We're here with some exciting and extensive changes to the availability of free user licenses in CRM Portals. This update provides users with access to all Portal user types for free to help them diversify their user licenses and explore

• Stock Count - Does it really work?

  We have been trying to use the new Zoho Inventory stock count feature. It seems great at first glance.. ..but what we can't get our heads around is if a count doesn't match you can't simply set up a recount of those that are unmatched, which just seems

• Create Ticket from Chat with Rest API

  Hi to everyone, is possible to create a ticket from Chat with Rest API? In user interface is possible by clicking on the button "Convert chat as a ticket". Anyone know how to do that? Thanks

• How to send binary data in invokeurl task?

  Hello, I am using Adobe's Protect PDF API. Source: https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/overview/pdf-services-api/ Everything works fine in Postman. But for some reason after encrypting the file, it is empty after password protecting the

• Next Page