Comparative Advertising

One of my friends was planning to buy a new car in sedan category. Since I am also an avid car lover, he requested me to help him.   I decided to do a research on the existing sedans in the Indian market. I thought that it will be a very difficult task to compare all the cars, given that huge number of players in the market.  

Which one is better in fuel economy, which one is good in looks, which one is more spacious which one will be in my friends’ budget?  There were innumerable questions of this kind coming to my mind.  I thought it will be a daunting task to do this comparative analysis.

To my surprise I spotted some advertisements which specifically provided the details mentioned above.   Within few hours   I was able to shortlist some of the appropriate cars for my friend.

All this was possible because of the comparative advertising. Comparative advertising compares alternative brands on objectively measureable attributes. It identifies the alternative brand by names, illustration or other distinctive information.

I got much more insight on the subject of comparative advertising in the session of Marktrix club at SJMSOM, IIT Bombay.  Dr. Arti Karlo, PhD. from IIT Madras and currently a Faculty in SJMSOM, discussed about her research project which was about comparative advertising on 8th Feb 2011.

She told that though it looks easy but a lot of effort goes into any comparative advertising campaign.  The subject of advertising or the entity is broken into different dimensions. Each dimension is then divided into sub dimensions. It is then used to identify the unmet potentials of the product.

Finally, for a successful comparative advertising campaign, we have to see that the right comparison strategy and information processing mode is used.  All these things, if in place, augment the effectiveness of the advertising message.

A CA campaign between HUL and P & G for Dove and Pantene shampoos

During the session several advertisements based on both direct and indirect comparisons were shown to help the students understand the concept.  She gave an interesting example of comparative advertising between Audi and BMW. BMW advertised through various mediums that it has won the best car of South Africa award.  Audi retaliated by saying that, “Congrats to BMW for being the South African car of the year 2006 from the world car of the year”

BMW vs Audi car of the year CA

She also told that comparative advertising is a boon for the customer or consumer as it helps them to know in detail what a particular company is offering and what not it is offering.

In the end it was a very informative session. She answered a lot of question asked by the students. I was having a lot of doubts about comparative advertising which were cleared during the session.