Marketers, Stop Donating Free Advertising To Your Competitors

"Every year, a challenger brand somewhere spends millions on a campaign designed to take down the category leader. Yet, somewhere in the execution they make the same strategic mistake that has plagued challenger marketing for decades: they build the entire thing around their competitor's identity. The result? They pay to make the market leader more memorable."

"If distinctive assets play a key role in building mental availability for your brand, what happens when you feature your competitor's assets in your advertising? You build mental availability for them. You are investing media budget to strengthen the very neural pathways that make your rival easier to recall. In essence, what you're doing isn't competitive strategy, but corporate subsidy."

"Marketing research has consistently shown that advertising builds and refreshes memory structures: emotional cues, brand associations, category entry points etc. System 1 showed us the ads that perform over time tend to be the ones that brand early, brand often, and deploy their own distinctive assets in ways that become tightly associated with the brand in consumer memory."

Challenger brands frequently spend millions on campaigns designed to defeat category leaders, yet repeatedly make the same strategic error by centering their advertising around competitors' identities. This approach backfires by making market leaders more memorable rather than less. Advertising builds memory structures through distinctive assets like logos, colors, taglines, and characters that create cognitive shortcuts for brand recall. When advertisers feature competitor assets in their own campaigns, they inadvertently invest media budget to strengthen neural pathways associated with rivals, effectively subsidizing competitor brand availability. This memory architecture problem represents one of marketing's most persistent and expensive errors, with Pepsi's recent Super Bowl execution serving as a contemporary example of this flawed strategy.

Read at Forbes