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The Potential Pitfalls of Attack Advertising
When the gloves come off, the stakes get higher.
In the battle for market share, companies often try an aggressive approach
when advertising their products. This kind of combative strategy often involves
knocking the company’s chief competitors. But that may not get the results you
want, warns Yogesh Joshi, assistant professor of marketing. A study co-authored
by Joshi, Yuxin Chen at the Stern School of Business, and Jagmohan Raju and Z.
John Zhang, both at the Wharton School, found that combative advertising can
actually cause consumers to feel less inclined to choose one product over
another—the exact opposite of what advertisers desire.
“The typical objective behind attack ads is to highly polarize customers
toward your product or service, and away from the middle,” says Joshi. “But you
may just hurt yourself instead of being able to lure consumers to your side.”
Joshi and his colleagues developed an economic model and supported it with
experiments where undergraduate students came into a lab and recorded their
preferences for competing products in select categories. These categories
included courier services, toothpastes, cars, batteries, and credit cards.
Students recorded their preferences between two products. Once their initial
preferences were recorded, students looked at advertisements from competing
products in each category, and stated their preferences again. After watching
aggressively targeted advertising, the students became more indifferent in some
categories, such as toothpaste, credit cards and cars, and more partisan in
others, such as courier services and batteries.
In mature, highly competitive product categories such as beer, automobiles
and wireless services, attack advertising may be particularly
counter-productive. Typically, advertising serves one of two roles—either being
informative or persuasive. Combative advertising, while seeking to persuade
consumers, does so at the expense of one’s rivals. Joshi’s research suggests
that it is not to advertisers’ advantage to use a blanket approach when weighing
the merits of a combative strategy. Instead, they should take under active
consideration the product category, and the level of responsiveness or
engagement the consumer is likely to have to ads in that category.
“The returns to combative advertising depend on how consumer preference is
impacted,” says Joshi. “And consumers can either become more partisan or more
indifferent when exposed to attack ads.”
Firms are then forced into escalating investment in advertising to little or
no effect, and ultimately price becomes the weapon of last resort. This leads to
a double whammy, forcing brand and product managers to spend more on advertising
while reducing price points, in the face of increasingly disengaged, indifferent
customers.
Joshi pointed to the results of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns of
President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain as an example.
In any election, candidates tailor messages towards specific voter segments
to gain their vote. Attack ads were, as always, a prominent feature of both
campaigns. The effectiveness of these messages varies from group to group, often
driven by how engaged the group is with the election process. A notable group in
the last election was young voters, a group historically notorious for their
disinterest in election matters.
Obama was able to engage this group by speaking to them in the language of
social networks and text messages. Once engaged, this group had open ears for
both candidates in the market. The combative ads then created strong
partisanship in young voters, as evidenced by clear movement toward a preferred
candidate and party.
“This is born out by the fact that young voters turned out in higher numbers
than in the last presidential election, and they canvassed in larger numbers,
and voted in larger numbers, “said Joshi. “Obama largely set the stage for their
engagement. It can even be argued that young voters were key to Obama's
victory.”
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