Praising the Competition May Benefit Your Brand

When it comes to competitor brands, most brands are likely to be antagonistic, either explicitly or implicitly criticizing their rivals and leveraging it to highlight the strengths of their own brands. For example, McDonald's and Burger King have been fighting a decades-long advertising war. In 2016, McDonald's France launched a TV commercial implying that Burger King stores were fewer and harder to find through the comparison of two roadside signs; soon Burger King launched a counterattack by extending the McDonald's commercial, in which a couple followed the signs and drove to McDonald's just to buy coffee for refreshment, and then continued to run to Burger King in the distance, implying that McDonald's burgers tasted awful. 

McDonald's commercial

Burger King's commercial

Such criticism of competitors has long been a regular tactic of brand competition, but it's not the only option. According to a recent study by Keisha M. Cutright, associate professor of marketing at Duke University, and Katherine M. Du, associate professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin, praising competitors can actually boost a brand's image and profitability.

They conducted a series of experiments with nearly 4,000 consumers. In one of the experiments, they showed a group of consumers a fictitious post of Kitkat praising Twix and showed a control group a post of Kitkat only mentioning its own product. As a result, those who were shown the post in which Kitkat praised Twix were 34% more likely to buy Kitkat in the next two weeks. And importantly, Twix did not benefit in sales from being praised by Kitkat. Professor Cutright says this effect is not surprising, "In a world where consumers are increasingly fed up with divisive, vitriolic messages, when a brand praised its competitor, consumers developed a more positive attitude and a stronger sense of connection to that brand, and ultimately bought more of these brands' products."

Of course, praising competing brands does not apply to all brands. In other words, this strategy will work better for some brands than for others. In follow-up experiments, Professor Cutright found that:

• For-profit brands benefit more from praising their competitors than non-profit brands. This may be because, on average, for-profit brands are perceived as less warm than non-profit brands, so consumers were particularly surprised and reacted more strongly to shows of warmth from for-profit brands.
• It is only effective for brands to praise their direct competitors; praising irrelevant brands is ineffective. In one of Professor Cutright's experiments, they showed consumers that an optical company praised a burger store, but such praise failed to raise the image or sales of the optical brand.
• Consumers who trusted advertising the least increased their positivity toward the brand the most when the brand praised its competitors. This is likely because these consumers have less positive baseline feelings towards brands, and so when they witness a brand demonstrate warmth by praising a competitor, it makes a more substantial impact on their impression of the brand.

Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and each organization must determine what works best for its unique brand and customers, and make that feel authentic. But Professor Cutright's findings show that praising competitors can be of great benefit to brands, both in terms of influencing consumer perceptions and increasing sales profits.