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

• UNAPPROVED record management

  When the unapproved list of duplicates is long, one needs the some tools to manage them - when this list has over 1500 records, we cannot manage it without some tools, such as: 1. The ability to apply a filter - ie similar to creating a CREATE a NEW VIEW

• Zoho mail filter Add to WorkDrive doesnt't work

  Hello, We have a problem with using the filter in the email. So, we want that when a bulk payment confirmation from the online store arrives, this email is automatically saved in HTML format on the drive using the action 'Add to Zoho WorkDrive -> Email

• Introducing Zia GenAI: Zoho's Native Generative AI for Zoho Desk

  Hello everyone, Zia GenAI is available on Early Access for Zoho Desk Enterprise subscribers. Kindly fill out this Registration Form to request early access. We are excited to announce the Beta release of Zia GenAI in Zoho Desk, now available through our

• Add blueprint buttons to listview and kanban

  Hello, just started to use the Blueprints feature - really useful. I have one suggestion to help this work even better - can there be transition buttons that appear on the top of listview & Kanban? Maybe an option as well - "Blueprint transitions appear

• Deleted message in SPAM

  In one of my gmail accounts (getnickifit@gmail.com) I had an email from PayPal in the SPAM folder. I thought I was moving the message to the inbox from the zoho mobile but it looks like it was deleted. It is no where to be found--inbox, trash, etc. Can it be restored?

• CRM x WorkDrive: File storage for new CRM signups is now powered by WorkDrive

  Availability Editions: All DCs: All Release plan: Released for new signups in all DCs. It will be enabled for existing users in a phased manner in the upcoming months. Help documentation: Documents in Zoho CRM Manage folders in Documents tab Manage files

• Multiple Facebook Pages under Single Brand

  Hi everyone, I'd like to know if there is a possibility of connecting multiple Facebook pages under a single brand on Zoho? At the moment, there are different Facebook pages of a single brand and would want to keep under the same brand on Zoho as we

• Zoho Books Estimate to Zoho CRM quote?

  I'm not sure why this isnt automatic, but maybe I'm missing something. When we create a quote in zoho books we have a custom function that pushes the contact into a deal within the CRM. I can not for the life of me figure out how to push an estimate from

• Zoho Developer Hangout (ZDH) – Episode 17 | Optimizing Organizational Processes through Automation

  Hey developers! Running a business can get quite overwhelming especially when juggling multiple tools like those in the Zoho ecosystem. Although integrating most of them is a piece of cake, manual intervention is needed at times. Being able to automate

• Apple Messages for Business in Omnichannel communications?

  Hello, Apple launched "Apple Messages for Business" but Zoho CRM or Zoho Desk don't appear in the list of possible integrators. Zoho already promotes https://www.zoho.com/crm/omnichannel.html Omni Channel integration, but Apple Messages does not yet appear.

• Kaizen #140 - Integrating Blog feed scraping service into Zoho CRM Dashboard

  Howdy Tech Wizards! Welcome to a fresh week of kaizen. This week, we will look at how to create a dashboard widget that displays the most recent blog post of your preferred products/services, updated daily at a specific time. We will leverage the potential

• Schedule meeting monthly on a particular day

  Suppose I wanted to schedule HR meeting every month on the first Tuesday with each employee separately for 20 minutes each. How could I automate these type of meetings? And if Sunday occurs on the first Tuesday I would like to shift that meeting on next

• In ZohoCRM Dashboards - Editing Shown Columns on Drilldown of Components

  Hello! I'm working with some Dashboards inside of ZohoCRM. When creating a component (In this case, specifically a KPI Ranking Component), I'd like to customize which fields show when trying to drilldown. For example, when I click on one of the sales

• Added Domain but SSL is not being set properly

  We added a Domain for our landing page and it pushed an SSL cert to it. The Cert is generated by LetsEncrypt, but it doesn't match our subdomain (i.e., it's just pointing to zohosites.com). How do we get the cert properly setup there?

• Zoho CRM Widget not displaying 2 related lists (JS)

  Okay so I basically have 2 relatedLists that I want to get and render: ZOHO.CRM.API.getRelatedRecords({ Entity: data.Entity, RecordID: data.EntityId, RelatedList: "Notes", page: 1, per_page: 200, }) ZOHO.CRM.API.getRelatedRecords({ Entity: data.Entity,

• KPI widget with percentage

  I'm trying to create a KPM widget that displays current performance as a percentage - something like the picture below. I've tried following the instructions at https://www.zoho.com/analytics/help/dashboard/kpi-widgets.html#chart but nothing ends up being

• Canvas List View Not Saving

  Hi, I am trying to edit a list view to look different depending on the tags. Everything worked well and saved well with multiple views, but when I have gone back in to make some small changes like moving one of the icons it comes up with the error message

• QR code image is not exported in PDFs

  The new QR code field works fine when I include it in a report template and I choose the print option: https://creatorapp.zoho.com/<username>/<app_link_name>/record-print/<report_link_name>/<record_ID>/ But when I try to save the document to a .pdf file

• QR codes in templates

  I'm excited about the new QR code generator. I have included a QR code that contains the record ID setting "${ID}" as input data. In the report detail it works perfectly but when printing it in a template the code is not shown.

• This mobile number has been marked spam. Please contact support.

  Hi Support, Can you tell me why number was marked as spam. I have having difficult to add my number as you keep requesting i must use it. My number is +63....163 Or is Zoho company excluding Philippines from their services?

• Zoho CRM search not working

  The search bar is not showing any results in our CRM installation. We have a lot of items and can not search them by using the navigation each time. Can someone please check this asap.

• Reload page with widget

  Hi all, I hope I can find some help here. I developed a small widget for Creator that is integrated into a page as a component. The page contains other content as well. When the widget is sent, the entire page should be reloaded to apply the changes to

• Tip of the week #37 - Manage all your Telegram business conversations directly from your shared inboxes.

  Tired of switching between multiple apps to manage your business conversations? With Zoho TeamInbox's multichannel inboxes, connect your Telegram channel to a shared inbox. This way, your teams can easily handle c View, reply, and collaborate on them

• Tags on notes aren't syncing correctly on Android

  I've created notes on the desktop version that have several tags assigned, but on both my Android devices those notes only have ONE of those tags instead of all of them, despite the actual content of the note being correctly synced, and I'm also starting

• Reports - custom layout - duplicate report

  Do you also have this problem and what is the possible solution? I duplicate a report that has a "custom layout". Unfortunately the custom layout is not duplicated. To be improved for a future release by Zoho. I export the custom layout and import it...

• How to map a global picklist from one module to another

  Hi there, i currently have a new field that is called sales office which we use for permission settings between our different offices located in different countries. It is a global set picklist with three different options: MY, SG and VN. I want to be

• Pageless mode needed to modernise Writer

  When we switched from GSuite to Zoho, one of the easiest apps I found to give up, was Docs. In many ways, Writer has always been more powerful than Docs, especially in terms of workflows/fillable forms/etc. However, I went back into Docs because I notice

• Changing the Logo Size on Zoho Sites

  My company logo incorporates both an image and text, and I would like it to be much more prominent on the page than is currently allowed by the small logo box in the template.  Is there any way to hide the page name and then make the logo box much bigger since my company name and logo are connected / are all in one file?  Thank you. 

• Is it possible to Select Item Serial Numbers from a Sales Order?

  Our accepted estimates are converted to Sales orders for our warehouse staff to pick.  How can my warehouse staff select the serial numbers for an item when editing a Sales Order?  Logically when staff pull an item and have the serial in front of them they update the Sales Order and select the serial. I understand a serial can be added when creating an invoice but how can accounts team know the serial if the warehouse staff can't select it! A basic flaw!

• MORE BUGS: Client Script, Deluge and Widget JS SDK don't work as expected when trying to retrieve a record that has been "rejected" as part of an approval process.

  Client Script $Page.record is null when accessing a record that has been "rejected" as part of an approval process. Deluge zoho.crm.getRecordById(moduleName, recordId) returns {"status":"failure"} when recordId is a valid, but rejected record. OK... I

• Zoho CRM Widget not displaying 2 related lists (JS)

  Okay so I basically have 2 relatedLists that I want to get and render: ZOHO.CRM.API.getRelatedRecords({ Entity: data.Entity, RecordID: data.EntityId, RelatedList: "Notes", page: 1, per_page: 200, }) ZOHO.CRM.API.getRelatedRecords({ Entity: data.Entity,

• Zoho Books and Zoho Projects Task Status Update

  How can we create an automation using custom functions for the following scenario. When our zoho books invoice status changes to paid. I want a task in Zoho projects to change to completed.

• Default Sort Order in Project Tasks View

  It should be possible to specify a default sort order (or have the last explicit sort order restored upon reload) for the tasks in the project tasks view. Currently the sort order must be manually re-selected for each sub-group whenever any changes are

• Different content per social media account..

  Is there a way to add different content per social media account on one post?

• Assigning Tasks and Requests to Groups... how do I?

  Guys, I've spent many hours exploring Zoho Support and we are generally satisfied with the system.  I'm trying to understand how a system that has so much to offer can be missing GROUP assignment and queue functionality.  I am hoping that there is a way

• Parsing of SQL query failed. Please check the SQL syntax.

  I am trying to have Zoho Analytics recognize that if the a Deal is in Stage "Need Docs" it should also be counted as a Deal in the Stage "New Lead" /*New Lead*/ SELECT "ID" 'New Lead' AS "Stage" From "Deals" Where "Stage" = 'Need Docs' Union All Error

• Where is the setting to enable/disable 2FA?

  The following links show where enable/disable 2FA is supposed to appear, but neither appear for me: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/zohosites/faq/account/articles/how-do-i-enable-or-disable-two-factor-authentication-for-my-account shows Security >

• 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

• Next Page