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

• Every time an event is updated, all participants receive an update email. How can I deactivate this?

  Every time an event is updated in Zoho CRM (e.g. change description, link to Lead) every participant of this meeting gets an update email. Another customer noticed this problem years ago in the Japanese community: https://help.zoho.com/portal/ja/community/topic/any-time-an-event-is-updated-on-zohocrm-calendar-it-sends-multiple-invites-to-the-participants-how-do-i-stop-that-from-happening

• Having Trouble Opening The Candidate Portal

  Recently am having trouble opening the Candidate Portal. It keeps loading but cannot display any widgets. Tried Safari, Chrome and Edge. Non of them work. Please solve the problem ASAP.

• Forms - Notification When Response Submitted

  How do I set it up to generate an email notification when a response (class request) is submitted?

• How to disable user entry on Answer Bot in Zobot

  Hi, I have an Answer Bot in my Zobot, here is the configuration: I only want the user to choose 1 of the 4 the options I have provided: When no answer found, user chooses 'I'll rephrase the question' or 'Ask a different question When answer is found,

• More admin control over user profiles

  It's important for our company, and I'm sure many others, to keep our users inline with our branding and professional appearance. It would be useful for administrators to have more control over profile aspects such as: Profile image User names Email signatures

• Please Make Zoho CRM Cadences Flexible: Allow Inserting and Reordering Follow-Up Steps

  Sales processes are not static. We test, learn, and adapt as customers respond differently than expected. Right now, Zoho Cadences do not support inserting a new step between existing follow-ups or changing the type of an existing primary step. If I realize

• Changing the Default Search Criteria for Finding Duplicates

  Hey everyone, is it possible to adjust the default search criteria for finding and merging duplicate records? Right now, CRM uses some (in my opinion nonsensical) fields as search criteria for duplicate records which do nothing except dilute the results.

• Clear Tag & Linking Between Quotes and Sales Orders

  Hi Zoho Team, In Zoho Books, when a quote is converted into a sales order, it would be extremely useful to have: A clear tag/indicator on the quote showing that it has been converted into a sales order. A direct link in the sales order back to the originating

• Zoho Books Sandbox environment

  Hello. Is there a free sandbox environment for the developers using Zoho Books API? I am working on the Zoho Books add-on and currently not ready to buy a premium service - maybe later when my add-on will start to bring money. Right now I just need a

• Add Direct Ticket Link to Zoho Help Center Portal in Email Replies

  Hi Zoho Support Team, We hope you're doing well. We’d like to request a small but valuable improvement to enhance the usability of the Zoho Help Center portal (https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/myarea). Currently, when someone from Zoho replies to a support

• [Webinar] Deluge Learning Series - AI-Powered Automation using Zoho Deluge and Gemini

  We’re excited to invite you to an exclusive 1-hour webinar where we’ll demonstrate how to bring the power of Google’s Gemini AI into your Zoho ecosystem using Deluge scripting. Whether you're looking to automate data extraction from PDFs or dynamically

• Connecting Zoho Inventory to ShipStation

  we are looking for someone to help connect via API shipStation with Zoho inventory. Any ideas? Thanks. Uri

• Subform edits don't appear in parent record timeline?

  Is it possible to have subform edits (like add row/delete row) appear in the Timeline for parent records? A user can edit a record, only edit the subform, and it doesn't appear in the timeline. Is there a workaround or way that we can show when a user

• New in Cadences: Option to Resume or Restart follow-ups when re-enrolling records into a Cadence, and specify custom un-enrollment criteria

  Managing follow-ups effectively involves understanding the appropriate timing for reaching out, as well as knowing when to take a break and resume later, or deciding if it's necessary to start the follow-up process anew. With two significant enhancements

• Im Stuck in an EDIT ONLY WITH WIZARD issue

  So I found Wizards to be a really helpful tool in minimizing the exposure of redundant, superfluous fields to staff that would never otherwise have to edit those fields. My issue is, that when the record (in this case a lead) is created with a wizard,

• Account upgrade

  Good evening, I upgraded my account and paid for it. From standard to professional. Unfortunately after the paiment my account was not upgraded. Please your advise. Best Regards Erik van Staverden

• How to set ALL default dates of my organization to DD-MM-YYYY format?

  All replies to this question comes from a time where the UI was different. It's extremely frustrating not being able to find how to do this simple setting change. I want everything and everyone in my organizations to have DD-MM-YYYY date format by default.

• How can I sync from Zoho Projects into an existing Zoho Sprints project?

  Hi I have managed to integrate Zoho Projects with Zoho Sprints and I can see that the integration works as a project was created in Zoho Sprints. But, what I would like to do is to sync into an existing Zoho Sprints project. Is there a way to make that

• Can we generate APK and IOS app?

  Dears, I want to know the availability to develop the app on zoho and after that .. generate the APK or IOS app  and after that I added them to play store or IOS store.. Is it possible to do this .. I want not to use zoho app or let my customers use it. thanks 

• Zoho Subform Workflows onAdd of Row

  Suppose I have a form with attached workflows onLoad. If I use the form as a subform, will it inherit the workflows or do I need to create new ones onAdd of row?

• Session Expired

  I constantly get "Session Expired" and need to relogin or close and open the application again. This gets really frustrating during the day. Is this something that can be solved? This really makes me want to leave the app as it is no go to need to reopen

• Super Admin removal

  I brought a sub, and I gave the Super admin rights to a person who is no longer with us, so I need to change, and I need to make myself the Super admin

• Better Notes Commenting

  Hi, I'd like to suggest better collaboration tools for NOTES. The current notes section for Accounts, Contacts and Deals is not ideally suitable for any degree of communication or collaboration. When responding to a note, there is no ability to leave

• Exporting Templates

  I have just spent 2 hours creating a project template for a Netsuite configuration, and want to share it with other Zoho Projects users - who have a different account. Is there any way to do this?

• Power of Automation:: Streamline Associated Teams based on the Task Owner update.

  Hello Everyone, A Custom function is a user-written set of code to achieve a specific requirement. Set the required conditions needed as when to trigger using the Workflow rules (be it Tasks / Project) and associate the custom function to it. Requirement:

• No Response from Zoho Support in 8 Days - Typical?

  I have a couple of issues I'm trying to work through. Initially, I was getting support from support@zohofsm.com, but I have not received a response in 8 days (11 on another question). Is this typical? Can I pay for support? For context, I am not spamming

• Add QUOTE OWNER profile image to a Quote Template

  I can add their email address.. phone number, DOB. I need to add a users profile picture so when they assign a template to a quote they own it adds their picture to the cover page. I've tried hacking a solution together but there has to be an easier way.

• Zoho Connections Desk API relative URL PATTERN_NOT_MATCHED

  While i am trying to do this: async function fetchTicketsFromDesk(timeFilter = 'current_month') { try { const response = await ZOHO.CRM.CONNECTION.invoke("desk_connection", { url: "/api/v1/tickets", method: "GET", }); const data = response.details ? JSON.parse(response.details)

• Zoho CRM - Custom Views for Portal Users

  I'm looking for an option to customise custom views for portal users in CRM. It would be great if "portal user" was a permission on custom views.

• 【参加無料】10/17(金) 東京 ユーザ交流会 Vol.3 参加登録 受付開始！

  ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの藤澤です。 10/17(金)に、東京・新橋で「東京 ユーザー交流会 Vol.3」を開催します！ 今回のユーザー事例セッションのテーマは、「Zoho Flowを活用した他社の決済サービスとの連携事例」です。 さらに、Zoho Flowに限らず、Analytics や Campaigns などの多彩なZohoサービスの活用方法について、豊富なご経験をもとにご紹介いただきます。 また、Zoho社員セッションでは、Zoho CRMを活用して日々の営業業務を効率化する具体的な事例をお話しします。業界を問わず、幅広い方にご参考いただける内容となっています！

• Zoho Meeting Plug compatibility with newer versions of Outlook

  Documentation states that the zoho meeting plug in for outlook is only compatible with versions up to Outlook 2019 What is available to users of more up to date versions of outlook/office 365?

• Getting Attachments in Zoho Desk via API

  Is there a way to get attachments into Zoho Desk via an API?      We have a process by which a zoho survey gets sent to the user as a link in a notification.    The survey has several upload fields where they can upload pdf documents.    I've created

• Introducing Zoho's own SMS gateway

  We're thrilled to announce the launch of our own SMS gateway feature within Zoho Marketing Automation! This new feature enables seamless SMS campaign management alongside your email marketing initiatives, providing a more integrated and efficient way

• Embedding in Desk articles

  We would like to embed documents in our Desk articles. When we use an iframe for the embed, we get scrollbars and a frame border. Neither of those is acceptable. I've spoken with the Desk Support team about what we want and they tell me that it cannot

• Zoho CRM button to download images from image upload field

  Hello, I am trying to create a button in Zoho CRM that I can place in my record details view for each record and use it to download all images in the image upload fields. I tried deluge, client scripts and even with a widget, but feel lost, could not

• Mass Update Contacts In Zoho Campaigns

  Is there a way to mass update contacts in zoho campaigns? I want to be able to change the content of a field for a few hundred contacts, and can't go through all of them individually.

• report showing assignment type

  Hi, We've created a number of workflows to allow us to auto assign tickets to agents based on keywords and other criteria. I'm struggling to create a report that would show me what is the percentage of tickets that are assigned automatically via workflows

• Option to Disable Knowledge Base Section in Feedback Widget Popup Hello Zoho Desk Team

  Hello Zoho Desk Team, How are you? We are actively using Zoho Desk and would like to make more use of the Feedback Widget. One of the ways we implement it is through the popup option. At the moment, the popup always displays the Knowledge Base section,

• Placeholders in Ticket Templates

  We should be able to use placeholders in ticket templates. When we create a new ticket, our description field is shown to the client in the email they receive.  It would be very handy to be able to personalize that description field in our ticket templates to pull in the name of the client that the ticket is for. Using them in the subject field as well, so we can auto populate Account Names, etc. 

• when the record is created the tag want to Show as Opportunity how i achive this using Deluge Script

  In the quotation i have the work flow schedule for create opportunity record in the module , on that time the quotation tag select as opportunity created. How i achive this using Deluge Script . this like i want to Do tag1 = Map(); tag1.put("name","Nurturing

• Next Page