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Communicus, Inc.
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Brands Under Attack!
Do you know how competitive advertising
is affecting your brand?
All advertisers worry about competitive advertising – you take note when your competitors introduce new ads, and you wonder how well their advertising is working. You might even conduct research to assess consumer reactions to their ads.

But, have you ever really quantified how the competitive campaign is affecting your brand? If you are advertising in a highly competitive category (and these days, who isn't?), the chances are good that competitive advertising may be producing a significant impact on your brand. The campaign doesn't even have to be explicitly competitive – when the 'Brand X' campaign effectively moves Brand X up on the scale of fulfilling a particular need, that same campaign is probably serving to move your brand down the scale.

The dynamics of how advertising impact cascades across other brands within a category is a phenomenon rarely addressed, but is an important dimension of how advertising works to influence brand perceptions and purchase decisions.
For example, if a particular brand successfully convinces consumers that this is a brand your kids will love, or is a brand that solves acne problems, the advertising often also causes consumers to question or discount the value of competitive brands as ones that kids love or that can effectively solve acne problems.

So how do you know if competitive advertising is affecting your brand? In order to isolate this dynamic, Communicus determines with the highest level of accuracy who has engaged with your advertising, your competitor's advertising, and who has been exposed to some combination of either. Then, we use our unique longitudinal design to tease out pre-existing attitudes and outside factors to isolate not only if, but how competitive brands are impacting each other – whether it be diminishing brand perceptions or actually causing switching within the category.

Through our research across a wide range of advertising categories, we've found important cross-brand impact occurs quite frequently, and not just when the advertising is making aggressive competitive claims. If you have competitors who advertise to any meaningful degree, there's a pretty good chance that their campaigns might be affecting perceptions of your brand. If so, they're probably having significant, but unmeasured, impact on sales and future purchase intentions for your brand.

You need to be most concerned about competitive advertising if:
  • You and another brand are fighting for similar positions: if you and your competitors are all fighting to be the cool brand or the brand that provides great headache relief, whoever doesn't win is going to be perceived as less cool or as less efficacious against headaches.
  • The competitive advertising includes a 'reason to believe' that may cause consumers to question the claims that you are making: if you're a food products marketer making a new claim about health benefits or risks, consumers will undoubtedly begin to question whether competitive brands are as healthy as they declare in their ads.
  • You are the #1 brand in the category: Apple's iPhone is attacked with the launch of every new smart phone; when you're the market leader every other brand is going to deliberately try to steal share with advertising that proves why they are the best choice.
The good news: your advertising might be taking a bite out of them, as well!

If you aren't measuring and diagnosing cross-brand advertising impact within your category, you won't be able to develop effective strategies to counteract competitive influence on your brand, nor will you be able to maximize the effects that your own ads have on competitive brands. Communicus provides in-market advertising research solutions that diagnose both the impact of your advertising (not only on your brand, but also on the entire category) and the impact of competitive advertising on your brand.
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