Coke vs. Pepsi is a classic example. In the Cola Wars, Pepsi, from time to time, punches up against Coke far, far more than Coke ever attacks Pepsi. Coke certainly increased their advertising in response to Pepsi in the height of the cola wars but they never attacked Pepsi outright.
Comparison advertising is also a "marketing smell" (by analogy to "code smell"). If you're doing comparison advertising, you're probably in a Cola War. Cola wars are a negative-sum game where you only have to increase advertising if the competition does--sort of a prisoners dilemma. It's preferable to avoid getting into those.
The classic example of the conventional wisdom you mention is Avis "We Try Harder" (#2) versus Hertz (#1).
To me "We Try Harder" has always sounded like a terrible slogan. In my mind it sounds like they try but fail, rather than actually doing things…
Re:Lying Microsoft Advertising
by BHSPitMonkey on Thursday May 23, 2013 @04:47PM
(#5759441)
"Avis: The 'A' is for effort!"
This mitigates the "defenseless kid" syndrome a bit, because if you only punch up you're by definition only taking on products that are stronger in the marketplace than yours is.
You can see this in action by comparing Apple's ads. They had no problem running the "I'm a Mac" ads when their product (the Mac) was far behind the market leader (Windows PCs). But iPad ads don't do product comparisons, because the iPad owns the tablet market so there's no upside to reminding people that "tablet" does not necessarily equal "iPad."