How to Help Your Competitors Online

Posted on July 31st, 2008. Written by Rico.

The personality behind chuvaness.com and owner of the local franchise of Pepper Lunch, a pricey yet unique fast-food-with-quality resto, recently spent time writing about a local imitator. With all due respect to her, Ms. Cecille Zamora simply helped her competitor’s cause.

You see, we at Technograph see any sort of online presence as a potentially valuable commodity; properly utilized, it can help build visibility for practically anything. By openly lambasting an imitator, and even taking the time to feature its menu and location, chuvaness actually advertised their presence.

Granted, she had reason to attack them. After all, the competitor threatens her brand and ultimately her bottom line. So, again with all due respect, she should’ve done a blind item. By being specific while avoiding naming names, she would’ve still called attention to her plight and build negative publicity for her target—without her efforts becoming an online advertisement for it.

In Ogilvy on Advertising, which is still a must-read for marketers today, advertising great David Ogilvy relates how mentioning a competing brands in advertisements actually benefits them. For some reason, in adverts that attack a competitor’s inadequacies, audiences tend to identify the competitor as the underdog, leading to sympathy for it.

Actually, the better route would’ve been not to mention the competitor at all. After all, why waste time increasing the profile of your competitors on your own website, when you could direct your efforts towards promoting your products and your services? This approach allows you to concentrate on differentiating your brand, and building appeal for what you have to offer.

Sure, if you rely on a blog, some mischievous readers will eventually leave comments for your competitors. But it will be their time that will be used up, and you can always keep their comments from seeing the light of day.

In short, it’s your website. So, to be frank, don’t waste time supporting your competitors.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 9:53 am and is filed under Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Rico

Rico Mossesgeld is the founding editor of Technograph. Learn more about him at rico.mossesgeld.com/about.

http://abuggedlife.com jayvee f.

there’s a big difference in quality though. i tried both and will never eat at the other one again :D PL forever!

(check the comments thread of the PL post and you’ll see how the food has turned consumers into zealots)

=)
http://chuvaness.com cecile

I just simply got tired of people confusing Pepper Lunch with Pepper Steak. One girl talked to me about franchising, mentioning we had a store in Promenade (Sizzling Pepper Steak). Another man tried to sue us because he got food poisoning in our store in Trinoma. Told that we only had one store, the guy ran away.
Also Sizzling Pepper Steak is registered as Pepper Lunch in the DTI, so we, the official franchisee of Pepper Lunch had to register as Peper Broers. Anyway we don’t mind if other people want to eat there. I just don’t want to be confused with the other brand.
Capisce?
http://technogra.ph Technograph

Jayvee, we wholeheartedly agree with Pepper Lunch’s quality, having eaten there twice ourselves. We also see how maddening it must be to have your brand being brought down by, for a lack of a better term, a cheap imitator.

But we still stand by our points, Cecile. Another aspect of that portion of Ogilvy’s book was that mentioning more than one brand tends to create confusion—the same one apparently displayed by your reference to “our store in Trinoma”.

You have one store: we believe that it’s still better to make that fact as clear as possible, sticking to your own brand and what it stands for, rather than using your significant online presence to create attention for the imitator.

If and when you open a new branch, you can now announce that you have two establishments. That will still let everyone know where to find the real deal, while implying that the rest are imitators.

There’s a lot you can do by sticking to what you (and only you) have to offer. The message created by exclusion can be very powerful. Again, you don’t have to specify who is imitating you. A simple warning about a certain establishment attempting to copy your formula unsuccessfully can be enough. The food poisoning story is a great weapon! You = quality and satisfaction. Imitator = food poisoning.

Regarding the actions of your competitor, they’ve done so much damage to you; do you really want to make their lives easier by talking about them?