The first salvo this time was fired by The Times of India. Its television commercial released in November 2011 for the southern markets revolved around this man with a newspaper who seemed to be dozing off at the first given opportunity — during a rally, at an award function, while a body-building competition is underway. It’s only towards the fag end of the commercial that you realised there is nothing wrong with our protagonist. The thing to blame was his newspaper — The Hindu, going by the look and feel — that simply put him to sleep. “Stuck with news that puts you to sleep?”, the commercial asked. It provided the answer in the very next frame — yes in bold type face — “Wake up to The Times of India.”
Now it’s the turn of The Hindu to get back. Its latest campaign — this time on national television — goes to a bunch of kids, ostensibly the target audience of The Times of India, and asks them a few simple questions: What is UPA? Who will succeed Ratan Tata? What did Dhyanchand play? The answer? Well… ummm… aha… Our youth get all flustered or get it all wrong. The thing to blame is… you guessed it… their newspaper: The Times of India.
Mind you, The Hindu and The Times of India are not the only ones. Think Sunfeast Yippee noodles. Two young boys wait eagerly as mommy prepares instant noodles in the kitchen. A big genie appears and volunteers to add some zing to their noodles dish. The boys are not impressed: Their Magic Masala noodles already has everything he can offer! The genie vanishes into thin air only to resurface later to try and steal a bite of Sunfeast Yuppie from one of the boys’ plate. Maggi Masala Damdaar? What in heaven’s name is that?
What comes across in this little skirmish is the flash of steel beneath the pesky messaging. Yes, time again to bare your fangs. As advertisers brace for a slowdown and begin pull back their spending, brands of every hue and in every other category seem to be taking direct swipes at competition. Instead of touting their own specs and features, they are going right for the competitor’s jugular, mocking the opponent’s personality or culture saying, “Hey, look at me.”
“If you have a compelling story to tell and facts to back it up, why not,” quips Sumanto Chattopadhyay, executive creative director, O&M (South Asia), the agency that works on the Hindu account. “Then you must be ready to stand your ground if there is a rebuttal.” According to Ravi Dhariwal, CEO, Bennett, Coleman & Co, “Comparative advertising helps bring a brand into focus.” While he does not want to go into the details of BCCL’s brief to its advertising agency Taproot, he says, “The whole idea was to present The Times of India as a youthful and contemporary brand and there is no better way than to say ‘wake up to the Times’.”
So why are these ads becoming rampant? Prathap Suthan, chief creative officer, iYogi, feels, “It’s now a question of survival for certain categories. The Times-Hindu tussle is also about staying relevant in a day and age when newspapers as a media vehicle are under attack — from television, from the internet.”
“When you are facing a crisis — be it internal or external — there is a tendency among marketers to go for more hard-hitting advertising,” says Ramesh Narayan, communication consultant and founder of Canco Advertising. The idea is to make the advertising buck work harder, to stay top of mind. And nothing grabs a consumer’s attention than a simple put down. The implicit assumption is, consumers don’t see do-gooders. So advertising is not just about giving your consumers a compelling reason to buy your product but to tell them your competitor’s product is useless, a waste of money or downright harmful.
But there’s a caveat. Explains Arvind Mohan, founder, Religious, “It is mostly a conversation a challenger brand engages in: If I am a new coffee brand it’s in my interest to say I am better than Nescafe. If I am a DoCoMo in an already cluttered market, I may want to say I am the cheapest, I offer one-second billing etc.” Challenger brands are designed as counterpoints and have permission to go around bashing the status-quo. Virgin and Pepsi, for instance. “It must be done in the authentic voice of your brand and in style,” adds Mohan.
Of course, comparative advertising is not a new monkey. Epic public spats include Pepsi versus Thums Up, Horlicks and Complan, Tide and Rin, Pepsodent-Colgate, and more recently BIG TV DTH and Airtel DTH and Axe versus Set Wet Zatak. In many of these cases, the whole issue has gone to the courts, but then brands have gone back done the whole thing all over again. In some cases, such wars have been as much about staying relevant as about protecting one’s turf. “When growth slows, categories plateau, the instinct is to become more rational in your communication, go back to facts and put it all before the audience,” says Mohan, pointing at launch of Eon, which pushed a best in class mileage story when it was launched in a dull market.
New rules of the game
Even until three decades ago, identifying competitor’s in your communication was regarded unethical. There was a sort of unwritten code of conduct where vilification or even a whispering campaign against another brand was one thing that gentlemen did not indulge in. Obviously the rules of the game are changing. “Brands are all pervasive,” says Narayan, “so I don’t see why the rules should be any different in the case of print brands. And once you have taken the gloves off, there’s no reason to act coy; you just get down and dirty.” Such comparisons in product advertising are rampant in the West. “In India, while libel and slander cases are not so rampant, it is surprising that we really haven’t seen much of direct comparative advertising earlier,” says Chattopadhyay of Ogilvy.
What has also changed is the way a brand refers to its target. Earlier, the brand names or any other verbal or visual references to the target were pixelated or beeped out to an extent that the viewer was often left wondering if she got the target right. Masking was the unwritten code. Now there are direct references to brand names — like Horlicks and Complan have done, or the way Hyundai Motors has compared the mileage offered by Eon to Maruti Alto and the Chevrolet Spark (approved, according to the company website, by the Automotive Research Association of India), or the Hindu’s recent tagline “Stay ahead of the Times.”
This brings us to the all important question: Does comparative advertising work? “The whole discourse of competition bashing is flawed and in my opinion seldom works,” says Mohan. “It implicitly acknowledges the competitor’s ideological framework. The battle is fought on the competitor’s terms, and the attempt is to say, ‘I am better than you at being you’.”
He cites the example of the Dettol-Savlon spat. When Savlon ran a series of ads claiming that while Dettol stings, Savlon is smooth, Dettol thought it pertinent to ignore Savlon’s posturing. “Dettol could have run ads saying it stings but kills more germs, but that would have been uncouth. It’s a different story that Dettol is a much bigger brand today,” he points out.
There are also issues related to the culture of a market and the sensibilities of its people. Pranesh Misra, chairman and managing director, Brandscapes Worldwide Consultancy, told this correspondent some years ago that research has shown that ads in which a brand lambasts competition with no apparent reason or without enough facts to back up its claims fail to cut ice with consumers. “There have been times when we were told ‘don’t chuck the competitor’s pack into the dustbin; you can push it to one corner of the table and put your brand at the centre but not out of the frame altogether’,” he said.
Also, in slamming competition, brands have to keep to the standards set by the advertising apex body, Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI). The ASCI clearly states, “Anybody who feels an ad is wrong in some way, either dishonest, untruthful, unsafe, indecent, illegal or unfair to competition can complain to ASCI.” Take the Sun Direct ad in the launch phase in 2009, which was based on its Rs 499 pricing, presumably the lowest in the category. But a fine print said consumers have to pay an installation fee of Rs 1,000, which worked out to be the same as that of the rival. That’s clever but misleading advertising.
“Interestingly, in many cases such relentless comparative advertising has helped bring down prices in a category,” says Hemant Misra, CEO, Publicis Capital. Look at the direct to home industry for proof. Probably a reason why category leader DishTV has taken a different route in its latest ‘Dish Sawar Hai’ campaign. Instead of touting price or technology it has taken the high ground of identifying itself with entertainment. “In most cases such ads have given consumers a reason to be suspicious of advertising in general and do their homework to get a fix on what they want and what they are getting,” sums up Misra.
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Comparative advertising Dos and don’ts |
