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

• Zoho CRM Meetings Module Issues

  We have a use-case that is very common in today's world, but won't work in Zoho CRM. We have an SDR (Sales Development Rep) who makes many calls per day to Leads and Contacts, and schedules meetings for our primary Sales Reps. He does this by logging

• Zoho Books integration sync from Zoho CRM does not work

  Hi Zoho Community & Zoho Support We just tried to get a sync some products into Zoho Books from CRM using the native sync and we're getting an error: "It looks like some mandatory fields you're trying to map are empty. Please provide valid field names

• P & L Sub-categorized accounts

  How can I show sub-categorized Income and Expense accounts on the P & L report?

• Report showing Bill Details with Project and Sales Invoice Number

  Hi There, I am hoping that someone can help, I am looking for report that can show the bill and expense details along with project its as assigned to and the invoice number that the sales has been raised in. The goal is I can filter a customer/project

• Advanced Payment for Inventory Items with serial numbers

  Hello, We sell equipment that we track the unique serial numbers on using Sales Orders. We can charge the customers an advanced payment, then the balance on delivery. We cannot figure out a way to do this in Books/Inventory: - Cannot part invoice a SO

• Is it possible to restrict ZCRM user to see only custom views created by administrator

  I have segmented data in my CRM and I want to allow different users to be able to see only parts of it based on some criteria. I've tried to create and share a custom view, but then there is always an option for user to see all open lead for example.

• Issues Logging into ZOHO

  Hello, one of my coworkers is having issues logging into ZOHO, she has requested a code when entering and the email is correct but she has not received the code. can you help us with this?

• Google Fonts Integration in Pagesense Popup Editor

  Hello Zoho Pagesense Team, We hope you're doing well. We’d like to submit a feature request to enhance Zoho Pagesense’s popup editor with Google Fonts support. Current Limitation: Currently, Pagesense offers a limited set of default fonts. Google Fonts

• Add Popup Rejection Metrics to Reports

  Hello Zoho PageSense Team, We would like to request improved reporting for popup interactions. Current Limitation: PageSense currently provides conversion data, but there is no clear visibility into: Popup rejections Popup closes (✕ button clicks) Dismissals

• Ability to Reset / Reinitialize Popup Cookies

  Hello Zoho PageSense Team, We would like to request the ability to manually reset popup cookies. Current Limitation: At the moment, it is not possible to initiate a new popup cookie from the our side. Visitors who rejected or closed a popup will not see

• Control Popup Cookie Expiration Duration

  Hello Zoho PageSense Team, We would like to request an enhancement related to popup cookie management. Current Limitation: Currently, PageSense popup cookies remain active for 365 days, and this duration cannot be modified by us. If a visitor closes or

• Clone / Export Popup Design Across PageSense Projects

  Hello Zoho PageSense Team, We hope you’re doing well. We would like to request an enhancement that allows popup designs to be reused across different PageSense projects. Problem Statement: Currently, Zoho PageSense allows popups to be duplicated only

• Are there settings for hyperlinks?

  Clicking a hyperlinked cell in Sheet creates this little pop-up with the actual hyperlink inside. Is it possible to have a 1-click link where if you click the cell it opens the link directly with no pop-up?

• Automatically include all ticket attachments in the ticket resolution email

  Hello Zoho Community, We are implementing Zoho Desk in a real customer-facing production environment and have run into a limitation that is becoming a blocking requirement for our clients. The problem When a ticket is closed or resolved, Zoho Desk sends

• Finding text within a ticket: Expand All or Search this Ticket

  The auto-collapse feature within a ticket is nice for screen scrolling, however it makes it difficult to find text within the ticket if the email is collapsed. In fact you cannot find text if it is collapsed. I would like to propose a feature that allows

• Books & Desk. Client mapping

  Hi, I’ve been using Zoho Books for several years and am now looking to improve my customer service. I'm experimenting with Zoho Desk and want to sync and map my client data from Zoho Books. However, it seems that mapping requires both contacts to have

• Zoho Creator to Zoho CRM Images

  Right now, I am trying to setup a Notes form within Zoho Creator. This Notes will note the Note section under Accounts > Selected Account. Right now, I use Zoho Flow to push the notes and it works just fine, with text only. Images do not get sent (there

• String handling

  If I cut a currency string from a quote and try and paste it into the Deal "Amount", it will fail unless I manually delete any commas. Dollar signs are no problem, but comma's seem to fail. Please correct this Input Validation error.

• What's new in Zoho Sheet: Simplify data entry and collaboration

  Hello, Zoho Sheet community! Last year, our team was focused on research and development so we could deliver updates that enhance your spreadsheet experience. This year, we’re excited to deliver those enhancements—but we'll be rolling them out incrementally

• WebDAV / FTP / SFTP protocols for syncing

  I believe the Zoho for Desktop app is built using a proprietary protocol. For the growing number of people using services such as odrive to sync multiple accounts from various providers (Google, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, etc.) it would be really helpful

• Consolidated report for multi-organisation

  I'm hoping to see this feature to be available but couldn't locate in anywhere in the trial version. Is this supported? The main aim to go to ERP is to have visibility of the multi-organisation in once place. I'm hopeful for this.

• Feature Request - Allow Customers To Pick Meeting Duration

  Hi Bookings Team, It would be great if there was an option to allow customers to pick a duration based on a max and minimum amount of time defined by me and in increments defined by me. For example, I have some slots which are available for customers

• Error Logs / Failure logs for Client Scripts Functions

  Hi Team, While we are implementing client scripts for the automation, it is working fine in few accounts but not working for others. So, it would be great if we can have error Logs for client scripts also just like custom functions. Is there any way that

• Support for Custom Fonts in Zoho Recruit Career Site and Candidate Portal

  Dear Zoho Recruit Team, I hope you're doing well. We would like to request the ability to use custom fonts in the Zoho Recruit Career Site and Candidate Portal. Currently only the default fonts (Roboto, Lato, and Montserrat) are available. While these

• YouTube Live streaming? how to? Zoom has this feature, built-in. Can't find it on zoho meetings.

  YouTube Live streaming? how to? Zoom has this feature, built-in. Can't find it on zoho meetings.

• Feature Request - A Way To Search Item Groups

  Hi Inventory Team, I can't find any way to filter or search by fields of Item Groups. It would be great to see that functionality added. I have a use case where a single product might come from 5 or more suppliers and each supplier's item is an Item in

• Feature Reqeust - Include MPN In Selectable FIelds

  I have noticed that the MPN is not available to show in the list view of Items. Please consider adding it as EAN, UPC and ISBN are all available, so it doesn't make much sense to exclude this similar option. Thanks for considering my feedback.

• Feature Request - Option To Hide Default System Fields on Items

  Hi Zoho Inventory Team, As far as I know it is not possible to hid some of the defult system fields on Items, such as UPC, MPN, EAN, ISBN. A good use case is that in many cases ISBN is not relevant and it would be an improved user experience if we could

• Making an email campaign into a Template

  I used a Zoho Campaign Template to create an email. Now I want to use this email and make it a new template, but this seems to be not possible. Am I missing something?

• Campaigns does not work!

  I am running into so many problems trying to use Zoho Campaigns, that I am seriously considering dropping the app from my (shrinking) list of Zoho applications I actually use. Apart from having to fight the software trying to create a design and email,

• Feature Request - Make Available "Alias Name" Field In Item List View

  Hi Zoho Inventory Team, I have noticed that the "Alias Name" field does not appear on the list of selectable columns in the Customise Columns feature in the Items module. This would be very useful to see for businesses who are using the Alias Name field

• Marketing Automation

  L.S. Marketing Automation is and has always been part of the Zoho One bundle - according to the information provided on the Zoho Website. Why when I open Marketing Automation do I get the following message?: "Your trial has expired. We hope you enjoyed

• Cliq iOS can't see shared screen

  Hello, I had this morning a video call with a colleague. She is using Cliq Desktop MacOS and wanted to share her screen with me. I'm on iPad. I noticed, while she shared her screen, I could only see her video, but not the shared screen... Does Cliq iOS is able to display shared screen, or is it somewhere else to be found ? Regards

• Bigin, more powerful than ever on iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe, and watchOS 26.

  Hot on the heels of Apple’s latest OS updates, we’ve rolled out several enhancements and features designed to help you get the most from your Apple devices. Enjoy a refined user experience with smoother navigation and a more content-focused Liquid Glass

• project name field issue- n8n

  Hey guys, I have a question. I want to create a new product using the workflow. The problem is with the product name field; I don't know how to fill it in. The workflow starts with retrieving information from the leads table, retrieving links to scrape

• Claude + MCP Server + Zoho CRM Integration – AI-Powered Sales Automation

  Hello Zoho Community 👋 I’m excited to share a recent integration we’ve worked on at OfficehubTech: ✅ Claude + MCP Server + Zoho CRM This integration connects Zoho CRM with Claude AI through our custom MCP Server, enabling intelligent AI-driven responses

• Automatic Matching from Bank Statements / Feeds

  Is it possible to have transactions from a feed or bank statement automatically match when certain criteria are met? My use case, which is pretty broadly applicable, is e-commerce transactions for merchant services accounts (clearing accounts). In these

• How to filter Packages in zoho inventory api

  Hi Team, I want to perform some tasks in a schedular on the packages which are in "Shipped" state. I tried to use filter_by in my api call but in return I get response as {"code":-1,"message":"Given filter is not configured"} My Api request is as follows

• CRM

  Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Our company is not moving out of using Gmail's web app. It just has more features and is a better email program than Zoho Mail. Gmail has an extension (Zoho CRM for Gmail) that we're using but we've found some serious

• ZOHO add-in issue

  I cannot connect ZOHO from my Outlook. I am getting this error.

• Next Page