From Burger King vs McDonald's to Pepsi vs Coca-Cola, some brand rivalries feel as old as time itself. We often see brands poking fun at one-another, but in most cases, its the smaller of the two that tries 'punching up' at its more successful competitor. And in the case of Pepsi's most recent Coke-baiting campaign, it's arguably starting to look a little desperate., which prominently feature a Diet Coke can.
Is using your competitor's brand assets a wise move?The ‘Tastes OK’ campaign looks to poke fun at Diet Coke by using letters from their competitor's name. But is it wise to heavily feature your main competitor's brand assets in your advertising? We researched a debranded… pic.twitter.com/LrNZKhfsrY research in Distinctive BAT, we “debrand” brand assets by removing mentions of the brand, retaining non-name elements.
In this instance, we debranded the Pepsi advert to gauge which brand consumers would attribute the advert to. The stronger an advert is branded, via the logo or other distinctive assets, the higher the brand linkage and ultimately the effectiveness of the campaign. You also have to remember that so much advertising is passive in nature, and just gently nudges and reminds consumers a brand exists.
Instead of its competitors' branding, Pepsi might do well to focus on its own successful recent rebrand in its advertising We weren’t surprised by the results as it replicated results we commonly see in other studies. Time and time again, the power of pack assets in driving branding scores comes to the fore.
A proper art director would have sorted it so the Pepsi line was as big as Coke: TASTES OK TASTES BETTER.Pepsi does it's ads in-house and this is what happens when marketing thinks it can do layouts. https://t.co/x9RCmynC14I think the “punching up” nature of this form of advertising can work but mentions of the competitor need to be more subtle and not the focus. As others have pointed out, Hertz have done this extremely well with their “We’re no.2, so we try harder” platform.