Advertising how superior your product or service is versus your competitor is a good strategy to attack the enemy while promoting your own brand. However, you would need to have a superior product or service to begin with. Even so, some companies can’t employ this strategy.
Listing features that your product or service is better than your competitor is a powerful way to attract consumers into buying from you. You are providing proof and trust when you display the numbers and results from your advertisements.
Versus advertising requires you to have a better product or service than your competitor in order to back up your claims. However, this tactic might incite your competitor to strengthen their weaknesses to counterattack your advertisements. Also your competitor might not be aware of their weaknesses so this strategy might be risky as you are exposing their weaknesses that they can improve upon to compete with you.
In order to effectively use versus advertising, you would need two factors. The first factor is to have a more superior product or service than your competitor. The second factor is to have more resources than your competitor. If you have more resources then employ this strategy because your enemy will not have enough R&D to improve their product or service. If your competitor has more resources than you, this strategy would be fatal as they can improve on their weaknesses with their massive resources in order to destroy you.
2 Comments
I agree that this is not a strategy for all businesses. There is a fine, fine line when playing with this sort of marketing fire. Think of “slur marketing” political campaigns that have gone very wrong…
I heard a name for this kind of I’m better than you self marketing: advertorialinsultomercialist. Interesting way of looking at it, and not too far off.
Though like you said, it can work (look at Coke v. Pepsi, for example), money isn’t always the determining factor for success.
Indeed Kate. This strategy can destroy you if you are dealing with a big company vs your small one. Best to just know you have the better product or service than to brag and hope of stealing customers from your big competitor because they have the resources to shut down your company. Marketing political campaign can be very cutthroat in order to win popular support. And I agree money isn’t always the determining factor of success. Learning and growing is.