From those sweet tasting colas to those shiny shampoos, from those healthy health drinks to
those luxurious airlines, each brand had their own style & strategy of
competing with their rivals though their interesting yet innovative campaigns.
It seems that after all that controversy & calmness the brands have again risen
to comparative advertising.
It
all started with the cola brands, the arch rivals – Coca Cola Inc & Pepsio
Co’s series of comparative advertising well know as the cola wars. Both the
brands successfully cashed in on this concept to be in the spotlight. This
effect was also seen in when Coca‐Cola
became the official cold drink of the1996 cricket World Cup & Pepsi greeted
coke with the campaign ‘Nothing official about it’. Later, Coke had to reply
with another campaign - “Eat Cricket! Sleep Cricket! Drink only Coca‐Cola!”
This continued many times before it became stable.
Then came the era of detergent wars between Tide
& Rin which was taken to court to sort out legally. We have also seen this
effect spreading in other industries to other brands like Head & Shoulders
and Pantene face-off, Horlicks v/s Complan tussle, & not to be forgotten Sprite v/s Mountain dew panga.
To quote the latest rivalry between The Hindu & TOI, it all started when The Times Of India (TOI) had recently, around November taken a dig at The
Hindu with its campaign ‘Wake Up Chennai‘ where they had clearly targeted
The Hindu. The Hindu commands to be holding the number 1 spot in Chennai, though a late reply it was a awesome reply. It has come up with its ‘Stay Ahead Of The Times’ campaign making an aggressive counter attack at the TOI with it’s different patterned print ads & TVC. Well unlike The Hindu, the TOI had an immediate say on the counter attack with a cool & calm reply in its ad – We congratulate the competition fpr finally waking up.
To conclude, comparative advertising might be good at times to pull the competitor’s leg & be in the spotlight but it might also tarnish a brand’s own image & hurt entire product segment. It is good only to an extent with the campaign being creative & not attacking the rival brand directly.
Woah look at this, the latest buzz is Bajaj Discover targeting it's rival Hero Honda Splendor in it's latest TVC - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyp1QECfas4
