Brand New Smackdown

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: spat over the red sofa, there have been at least half a dozen brands that have locked horns with their chief rivals. “When you have specific facts to back up your claim, what’s the harm in telling the consumer all?” asks Sanjay Nayak of McCann Erickson Worldgroup.

So unlike in the past, when the brand that was attacked was projected subtly—it could have practically been any other rival brand—the references today are direct and, at times, pretty merciless. Yesterday, when that said Your Brand was superior to Brand X, packs of Brand X were deliberately pixelated and any mention of that name beeped out. Things like digitising and colour-coding the rival also helped minimise the chance of being hauled up by the industry apex body, The Advertising Standards Council of India. But, of course, nobody was nobody’s fool. The consumer got the point—hopefully more often than not—the agency was happy, and the marketing manager said that was money well spent.

Cut to the present. Your Brand is actually naming Brand X in its communication and, if all’s going well, it is also kicking and nudging the pack of Brand X out of the frame—the

TV screen in this case. Remember Rin Matic, and how it dodged the Ariel- green pack? Or the latest series of ads from arch rivals Horlicks and Complan where each has names the other. While the spat has gone all the way up to the courts of law, the fact is, in the run up to the court case, there was no ‘masking’ of the attack, no censoring of audio-visual cues and mnemonics.

But is competitive advertising such a great idea? Some would go so far as to say that such a technique may backfire since every mention of a competitor’s brand in an ad increases the probability that the consumer will think the ad is for that of the competitor.

Indeed, advertising research commonly finds that a large part of the audience tends to believe that it is the competitor’s product that is being advertised. Needless to say, this can be absolutely fatal—in effect, an advertiser could potentially be spending his hard-earned buck to promote a competitor’s brand!