5 ms·

It's only in the US that I have seen advertisements for a product include direct bashing of a competitor's product. I am not talking about a list of features wh

by anxx 13y ago

It's only in the US that I have seen advertisements for a product include direct bashing of a competitor's product. I am not talking about a list of features where you show in which way yours is superior; that is still acceptable (although also deceiving much of the time). I am talking about ads like the Nimoy-Quinto Audi commercial where Nimoy had stupid problems fitting stuff into the Mercedes. This is such a jarring way to advertise, it's like watching a bully beat a defenseless kid - does anybody feel more sympathy towards the product this way?

criley 13y ago
I've always chalked it up not as advertising but as branding. Those commercials serve to build a brand around a product and keep current owners involved in the brand, through feelings of superiority or whatever. It's like CocaCola commercials: they don't need awareness through advertising, they want branding. Everyone knows what Coke is, but they want you to associate happiness with their product, so they keep branding. So when I see luxury brands bashing each other, I imagine that's part of what rich people pay BMW and Mercedes for. For that feeling of "I'm better than you because I own X", which the brands deliver through marketing like this.
mullingitover 13y ago
> This is such a jarring way to advertise, it's like watching a bully beat a defenseless kid - does anybody feel more sympathy towards the product this way? At least in this case, the iPad is so dominant that they probably feel there's no alternative but to address it directly. I'm sure the marketing team knows better, but they're making the comparison because they're in a position of extreme weakness. It's an act of desperation. The defenseless kid here is actually Microsoft.
snprbob86 13y ago
Apple ran the "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ads. Those started off as great advertising because they only pointed out bad things about Windows that everyone already accepted as bad things. Once those ads started becoming unnecessarily adversarial, they became bad advertising. Apple probably ran that campaign a bit too long. Depending on your point of view, Apple's products are either A) Clearly superior or B) Not obviously inferior. For a not insignificant number of people, their choice of smartphone is a personal statement. Attacking products that people love is not a good way to create converts. Attacking products that clearly suck works until a point. Then it starts to feel like a bully beating a defenseless kid. Microsoft's advertising feels more like a nerdy kid who spent all night thinking up clever and witty retorts, only to fail miserably in delivering them when face to face with the bully. The crowd of cool kids don't laugh with the nerdy kid, they laugh at them.
- tbrownaw 13y ago
  Depending on your point of view, Apple's products are either A) Clearly superior or B) Not obviously inferior. I prefer systems with a window manager that actually supports multi-tasking. Having one shared menu bar is a pain. Having a row of icons for possibly-already-running applications, instead of a list of what windows you have open, is a pain. Click-to-raise is less of a pain, but still annoying. Which is why I run XFCE on my desktop at home, since MS Windows and Gnome (and I think KDE?) get this one just as wrong as Apple does.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    One shared menu bar at the top of the screen is supported by Fitts's Law, which says that targets at the edge of the screen are faster and easier to click: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law No comment on the rest.
    - tbrownaw 13y ago
      Fitt's Law also says that closer targets are easier to click, and is concerned only with how long it takes to move the mouse pointer rather than how that fits into the larger picture of what you're doing. Having the menu separate from the window breaks spatial locality and associates the menu to the computer rather than to the application.
      - iaskwhy 13y ago
        And this is mostly relevant on big screens like the biggest iMacs. It's just wrong, imo.
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    Gnome doesn't require "click-to-raise," though it's the default.
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  You aren't likely to convert any current tablet owner with a commercial. You can influence the customers who aren't married to any ecosystem or brand, though.
Someone 13y ago
In the EU, such advertisements are illegal. http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/consumers/consumer_information/l32010_en.htm http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/consumers/consumer_in...: "Comparative advertising Comparative advertising explicitly or by implication makes reference to a competitor or competing goods or services. This type of advertising is only permitted when it is not misleading. It can be a legitimate means of informing consumers of what is in their interests. Therefore, in particular, the comparisons should: - relate to goods or services which meet the same needs or are intended for the same purpose; - relate to products with the same designation of origin; - deal objectively with the material, relevant, verifiable and representative features of those goods or services, which may include price; - avoid creating confusion between traders, and should not discredit, imitate or take advantage of the trade mark or trade names of a competitor." That is one reason why you will not see such advertising in the EU. Another may be cultural; in some EU countries, all comparative advertising was illegal before this EU directive (yes, you could not even show your product as being inferior in every way) Finally, some would see this as the offenseless kid attempting to beat the captain of the boxing team.
- amatix 13y ago
  > This type of advertising is only permitted when it is not misleading Maybe you missed a bit? It's perfectly legal, you just need to be 100% factual, and if you're not you'll get taken to the cleaners in court. So people are suitably wary of using it, but it does happen. (Same basic principles apply in New Zealand, fwiw)
  - Someone 13y ago
    I replied to the first line of the post. It reads: "It's only in the US that I have seen advertisements for a product include direct bashing of a competitor's product". In the EU, you cannot get away with 'direct bashing'.
    - amatix 13y ago
      You can bash, as long as it's factual: "X is more expensive, has a lower resolution, smaller area display, shorter battery life, and is heavier than Y. Buy Y!". They're all facts. But you can't say (in the rest of the world outside the US anyway) "X sucks because it's slower than Y. Buy Y!", unless you have big brave lawyers or X is somehow slower on every independent factual measure.
smacktoward 13y ago
The conventional wisdom is that you should punch up, not down. In other words, if you're behind the market leader, it's OK to throw a punch at it in your ads, because your product isn't as widely known or understood as theirs is. But if you are the market leader, you don't throw punches at competitors, because you're already winning and doing so just reminds the viewer/reader/whatever that other alternatives exist. This mitigates the "defenseless kid" syndrome a bit, because if you only punch up you're by definition only taking on products that are stronger in the marketplace than yours is. You can see this in action by comparing Apple's ads. They had no problem running the "I'm a Mac" ads when their product (the Mac) was far behind the market leader (Windows PCs). But iPad ads don't do product comparisons, because the iPad owns the tablet market so there's no upside to reminding people that "tablet" does not necessarily equal "iPad."
- mturmon 13y ago
  The classic example of the conventional wisdom you mention is Avis "We Try Harder" (#2) versus Hertz (#1).
  - k33l0r 13y ago
    To me "We Try Harder" has always sounded like a terrible slogan. In my mind it sounds like they try but fail, rather than actually doing things…
    - BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
      "Avis: The 'A' is for effort!"
- philwelch 13y ago
  Coke vs. Pepsi is a classic example. In the Cola Wars, Pepsi, from time to time, punches up against Coke far, far more than Coke ever attacks Pepsi. Coke certainly increased their advertising in response to Pepsi in the height of the cola wars but they never attacked Pepsi outright. Comparison advertising is also a "marketing smell" (by analogy to "code smell"). If you're doing comparison advertising, you're probably in a Cola War. Cola wars are a negative-sum game where you only have to increase advertising if the competition does--sort of a prisoners dilemma. It's preferable to avoid getting into those.
mtgx 13y ago
Yes, I think it's illegal in Europe, or at least in some countries.
Lewton 13y ago
Advertising like that is illegal here in denmark. it's one of the biggest 'culture shocks' I had when visiting the USA. Turning on the tv and seeing an ad openly trashing another product (Along side with seeing a movie edited for tv and broken up with ads every 10 minutes. Also illegal in denmark) The ad in question was for some kind of medicine for upset stomachs.. A guy is sitting at a bar complaining about his stomach going "I tried this medicine" holds competitors product up to the camera "But it didn't work AT ALL" and then his friend saying "oh there's your problem, this will fix it".. Very bizarre and shockingly disgusting way to advertise (for someone who grew up in a culture without it)
- bostonpete 13y ago
  > Very bizarre and shockingly disgusting way to advertise Seems more direct than the alternative. If you believe you have strengths compared to your major competitor, why is it bad to lay out the comparison explicitly in your marketing? Sure, comparative advertising can go to far, but why not leave it up the company doing the advertising to make sure they don't come off looking petty?
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    Because they lie. Directly, or through omission, or through implication, or through some ridiculously convoluted means, but we all know it to be true; we cannot trust the advertiser.
    - pionar 13y ago
      > we cannot trust the advertiser. Of course you can't. That's why you don't just take advertising at its word. Anyone who does is a fool. But to say that you shouldn't allow comparative advertising because of the possibility of lying is absurd. There are other laws that cover truth in advertising.
      - EliRivers 13y ago
        Using someone else's brand, without their permission, in a way that will damage their brand, to try to sell your own goods, in a way that everyone knows is going to be fantastically biased. Seems pretty out of order to me. :)
jmduke 13y ago
To talk about this from a marketing perspective: Comparative advertising is best described as a necessary evil. Marketers hate using it -- it's their equivalent of the nuclear option. It's cheap, unimaginative, and universally weakens the customer's evaluation of the brand. The issue is that it, like a nuclear bomb, it's incredibly effective. Customers remember comparative advertising better, digest it more effectively, and it helps disseminate cognitive information clearly. Ironically, customers internalize comparative advertising more often with regards to the product being denigrated (ie. "This product is worse!") than with the product being promoted (ie. "This product is better!") This is important with low-effort purchases like <$20 consumer goods. (As an aside: I think the idea of making comparative advertisements illegal is absolutely absurd. What should be made illegal, though, are advertisements like this, which are blatantly false no matter what the fine print says.)
gcb0 13y ago
yes, in Europe it's subtle at least. remember a BMW (or audi, or benz) comercial where it showed a spy type scaping from several bad guys, and all the bad guys had the competitor car (i think the bad guys had mbenz) and they were all sliding off curves and crashing...
- zalew 13y ago
  there were quite a lot BMW/Audi/Merc competitive commercials in the US market. to name a few: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VohEkWMkbsI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VohEkWMkbsI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auEdEYY3ao4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auEdEYY3ao4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfTyVL9TQmA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfTyVL9TQmA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWh6sSl_5Is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWh6sSl_5Is
geoka9 13y ago
Maybe slightly off-topic, but I came across a sly (and clever) way to advertise by belittling your competition: http://www.specialized.com/us/en/bc/SBCBkModel.jsp?spid=38443 http://www.specialized.com/us/en/bc/SBCBkModel.jsp?spid=3844... The 404 page ("Oops! Looks like we lost one"). Anyone who is into road cycling will get the pun immediately. Specialized vs Giant. The Rabobank team rides Giants. While the Specialized guy is riding in the front of the pack on that picture :)

by anxx 13y ago

criley 13y ago

I've always chalked it up not as advertising but as branding. Those commercials serve to build a brand around a product and keep current owners involved in the brand, through feelings of superiority or whatever. It's like CocaCola commercials: they don't need awareness through advertising, they want branding. Everyone knows what Coke is, but they want you to associate happiness with their product, so they keep branding. So when I see luxury brands bashing each other, I imagine that's part of what rich people pay BMW and Mercedes for. For that feeling of "I'm better than you because I own X", which the brands deliver through marketing like this.

mullingitover 13y ago

> This is such a jarring way to advertise, it's like watching a bully beat a defenseless kid - does anybody feel more sympathy towards the product this way? At least in this case, the iPad is so dominant that they probably feel there's no alternative but to address it directly. I'm sure the marketing team knows better, but they're making the comparison because they're in a position of extreme weakness. It's an act of desperation. The defenseless kid here is actually Microsoft.

snprbob86 13y ago

Apple ran the "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ads. Those started off as great advertising because they only pointed out bad things about Windows that everyone already accepted as bad things. Once those ads started becoming unnecessarily adversarial, they became bad advertising. Apple probably ran that campaign a bit too long. Depending on your point of view, Apple's products are either A) Clearly superior or B) Not obviously inferior. For a not insignificant number of people, their choice of smartphone is a personal statement. Attacking products that people love is not a good way to create converts. Attacking products that clearly suck works until a point. Then it starts to feel like a bully beating a defenseless kid. Microsoft's advertising feels more like a nerdy kid who spent all night thinking up clever and witty retorts, only to fail miserably in delivering them when face to face with the bully. The crowd of cool kids don't laugh with the nerdy kid, they laugh at them.

tbrownaw 13y ago
Depending on your point of view, Apple's products are either A) Clearly superior or B) Not obviously inferior. I prefer systems with a window manager that actually supports multi-tasking. Having one shared menu bar is a pain. Having a row of icons for possibly-already-running applications, instead of a list of what windows you have open, is a pain. Click-to-raise is less of a pain, but still annoying. Which is why I run XFCE on my desktop at home, since MS Windows and Gnome (and I think KDE?) get this one just as wrong as Apple does.
- mikeash 13y ago
  One shared menu bar at the top of the screen is supported by Fitts's Law, which says that targets at the edge of the screen are faster and easier to click: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law No comment on the rest.
  - tbrownaw 13y ago
    Fitt's Law also says that closer targets are easier to click, and is concerned only with how long it takes to move the mouse pointer rather than how that fits into the larger picture of what you're doing. Having the menu separate from the window breaks spatial locality and associates the menu to the computer rather than to the application.
    - iaskwhy 13y ago
      And this is mostly relevant on big screens like the biggest iMacs. It's just wrong, imo.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  Gnome doesn't require "click-to-raise," though it's the default.
nsxwolf 13y ago
You aren't likely to convert any current tablet owner with a commercial. You can influence the customers who aren't married to any ecosystem or brand, though.

Someone 13y ago

In the EU, such advertisements are illegal. http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/consumers/consumer_information/l32010_en.htm http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/consumers/consumer_in...: "Comparative advertising Comparative advertising explicitly or by implication makes reference to a competitor or competing goods or services. This type of advertising is only permitted when it is not misleading. It can be a legitimate means of informing consumers of what is in their interests. Therefore, in particular, the comparisons should: - relate to goods or services which meet the same needs or are intended for the same purpose; - relate to products with the same designation of origin; - deal objectively with the material, relevant, verifiable and representative features of those goods or services, which may include price; - avoid creating confusion between traders, and should not discredit, imitate or take advantage of the trade mark or trade names of a competitor." That is one reason why you will not see such advertising in the EU. Another may be cultural; in some EU countries, all comparative advertising was illegal before this EU directive (yes, you could not even show your product as being inferior in every way) Finally, some would see this as the offenseless kid attempting to beat the captain of the boxing team.

amatix 13y ago
> This type of advertising is only permitted when it is not misleading Maybe you missed a bit? It's perfectly legal, you just need to be 100% factual, and if you're not you'll get taken to the cleaners in court. So people are suitably wary of using it, but it does happen. (Same basic principles apply in New Zealand, fwiw)
- Someone 13y ago
  I replied to the first line of the post. It reads: "It's only in the US that I have seen advertisements for a product include direct bashing of a competitor's product". In the EU, you cannot get away with 'direct bashing'.
  - amatix 13y ago
    You can bash, as long as it's factual: "X is more expensive, has a lower resolution, smaller area display, shorter battery life, and is heavier than Y. Buy Y!". They're all facts. But you can't say (in the rest of the world outside the US anyway) "X sucks because it's slower than Y. Buy Y!", unless you have big brave lawyers or X is somehow slower on every independent factual measure.

smacktoward 13y ago

The conventional wisdom is that you should punch up, not down. In other words, if you're behind the market leader, it's OK to throw a punch at it in your ads, because your product isn't as widely known or understood as theirs is. But if you are the market leader, you don't throw punches at competitors, because you're already winning and doing so just reminds the viewer/reader/whatever that other alternatives exist. This mitigates the "defenseless kid" syndrome a bit, because if you only punch up you're by definition only taking on products that are stronger in the marketplace than yours is. You can see this in action by comparing Apple's ads. They had no problem running the "I'm a Mac" ads when their product (the Mac) was far behind the market leader (Windows PCs). But iPad ads don't do product comparisons, because the iPad owns the tablet market so there's no upside to reminding people that "tablet" does not necessarily equal "iPad."

mturmon 13y ago
The classic example of the conventional wisdom you mention is Avis "We Try Harder" (#2) versus Hertz (#1).
- k33l0r 13y ago
  To me "We Try Harder" has always sounded like a terrible slogan. In my mind it sounds like they try but fail, rather than actually doing things…
  - BHSPitMonkey 13y ago
    "Avis: The 'A' is for effort!"
philwelch 13y ago
Coke vs. Pepsi is a classic example. In the Cola Wars, Pepsi, from time to time, punches up against Coke far, far more than Coke ever attacks Pepsi. Coke certainly increased their advertising in response to Pepsi in the height of the cola wars but they never attacked Pepsi outright. Comparison advertising is also a "marketing smell" (by analogy to "code smell"). If you're doing comparison advertising, you're probably in a Cola War. Cola wars are a negative-sum game where you only have to increase advertising if the competition does--sort of a prisoners dilemma. It's preferable to avoid getting into those.

mtgx 13y ago

Yes, I think it's illegal in Europe, or at least in some countries.

Lewton 13y ago

Advertising like that is illegal here in denmark. it's one of the biggest 'culture shocks' I had when visiting the USA. Turning on the tv and seeing an ad openly trashing another product (Along side with seeing a movie edited for tv and broken up with ads every 10 minutes. Also illegal in denmark) The ad in question was for some kind of medicine for upset stomachs.. A guy is sitting at a bar complaining about his stomach going "I tried this medicine" holds competitors product up to the camera "But it didn't work AT ALL" and then his friend saying "oh there's your problem, this will fix it".. Very bizarre and shockingly disgusting way to advertise (for someone who grew up in a culture without it)

bostonpete 13y ago
> Very bizarre and shockingly disgusting way to advertise Seems more direct than the alternative. If you believe you have strengths compared to your major competitor, why is it bad to lay out the comparison explicitly in your marketing? Sure, comparative advertising can go to far, but why not leave it up the company doing the advertising to make sure they don't come off looking petty?
- EliRivers 13y ago
  Because they lie. Directly, or through omission, or through implication, or through some ridiculously convoluted means, but we all know it to be true; we cannot trust the advertiser.
  - pionar 13y ago
    > we cannot trust the advertiser. Of course you can't. That's why you don't just take advertising at its word. Anyone who does is a fool. But to say that you shouldn't allow comparative advertising because of the possibility of lying is absurd. There are other laws that cover truth in advertising.
    - EliRivers 13y ago
      Using someone else's brand, without their permission, in a way that will damage their brand, to try to sell your own goods, in a way that everyone knows is going to be fantastically biased. Seems pretty out of order to me. :)

jmduke 13y ago

To talk about this from a marketing perspective: Comparative advertising is best described as a necessary evil. Marketers hate using it -- it's their equivalent of the nuclear option. It's cheap, unimaginative, and universally weakens the customer's evaluation of the brand. The issue is that it, like a nuclear bomb, it's incredibly effective. Customers remember comparative advertising better, digest it more effectively, and it helps disseminate cognitive information clearly. Ironically, customers internalize comparative advertising more often with regards to the product being denigrated (ie. "This product is worse!") than with the product being promoted (ie. "This product is better!") This is important with low-effort purchases like <$20 consumer goods. (As an aside: I think the idea of making comparative advertisements illegal is absolutely absurd. What should be made illegal, though, are advertisements like this, which are blatantly false no matter what the fine print says.)

gcb0 13y ago

yes, in Europe it's subtle at least. remember a BMW (or audi, or benz) comercial where it showed a spy type scaping from several bad guys, and all the bad guys had the competitor car (i think the bad guys had mbenz) and they were all sliding off curves and crashing...

zalew 13y ago
there were quite a lot BMW/Audi/Merc competitive commercials in the US market. to name a few: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VohEkWMkbsI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VohEkWMkbsI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auEdEYY3ao4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auEdEYY3ao4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfTyVL9TQmA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfTyVL9TQmA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWh6sSl_5Is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWh6sSl_5Is

geoka9 13y ago

Maybe slightly off-topic, but I came across a sly (and clever) way to advertise by belittling your competition: http://www.specialized.com/us/en/bc/SBCBkModel.jsp?spid=38443 http://www.specialized.com/us/en/bc/SBCBkModel.jsp?spid=3844... The 404 page ("Oops! Looks like we lost one"). Anyone who is into road cycling will get the pun immediately. Specialized vs Giant. The Rabobank team rides Giants. While the Specialized guy is riding in the front of the pack on that picture :)