#Ad wars for the smartphone market free

The huge margins on these products allowed extensive advertising budgets for those peddling miracle drugs. These “herbal remedies” and “natural cures”, most containing alcohol and some with a spoonful of cocaine and opium to help the medicine go down, cost very little to produce. Using 1850 as our starting point, the advertising that most defined the latter half of the 19th Century was the almost 100% pure hype of patent medicines. If the audience is younger, less educated, and male you’ll get a better response. It’s better to focus on the features of a specific product than attack the company itself. YOU CAN PUNCH THEM IN THE FEATURES, BUT NOT IN THE FACE ( Pechman & Stewart 1990, Zhang 2006 and Beard 2011) When your target is your size it causes confusion, price competition, switching, and indifference. ( Grewal, Kavnoor, Fern, Costley, & Barnes 1997 and Beard 2008) The advantage goes to new brands and smaller brands.

YOU CAN PUNCH UP, BUT YOU CAN’T PUNCH DOWN

So it can cost you a lot of time and money and you better think twice before you engage in it, but does it work? After looking at the history and research on Comparative Advertising here are the rules of the road: ‘…the category has declined every year for several years… and between, we’re spending $60 million a year to convince consumers that our spaghetti sauce is really crappy’ - Sorescu & Gelb, 2013 What does all the running down of each other really get you? One of the combatants in the Soup Wars remarked: Conner stated “ Small nations have fought for their very survival with less resources and resourcefulness than these antagonists.” Not only is the expense great but there is also the impact on the public’s perception of the contending Brands. Regardless, for both the companies Bryan mentioned who chose to go on an attack, and any advertiser who has done the same with their ads, there is always the chance of backlash: and if your competitor is game that’s what you’ll be spending your time and energy on while others are innovating and focusing on what really matters, making the best product or service they can and introducing it to as many people as possible.Īfter reviewing a 10-year advertising war between Tylenol and Advil Federal Judge William C. The big difference is, with advertising you’re making a calculated choice and can plan for the consequences, both good and bad, while if you’re talking at a public event you’ve got to be able to respond in real-time. It wasn’t advertising they were doing when they decided to run down their competition but the rhetoric spurred Bryan’s questions all the same, and I answered the call. So why was Bryan asking me these questions? Apparently, he’d heard a couple of different service companies in the podcast space being critical of their competition in public forums. The History of Advertising has become a bit of a passion for me and I was curious myself to find the answers to his questions. In Comparative Advertising, competitors are mentioned or implied in order to demonstrate why their product or service is inferior to the one advertised.Īnd the second question was “When did Comparative Advertising stop in advertising history, and what lessons did people learn about it?” And since there are differing definitions of what Comparative Advertising is, for the sake of this article, I’ll define Comparative Advertising a bit more broadly than others: We’ll call it Comparative Advertising to take the edge off.

This time around the question Bryan put to me was twofold.įirst, “Would you want to work on an article about why it’s bad for companies to $h!t on each other?”

#Ad wars for the smartphone market free

Catch it early on our free Supercast feed along with narrated versions of our articles, or find it wherever you get your podcasts. Sean King, EVP at Veritone One joins us to talk all about synthetic voice which empowers Sounds Profitable en Español.