Today in Digital Marketing - Making Friends with the Enemy — Your Best Strategy

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

As marketers, we're taught early on that even the mere mention of the existence of a competitor is a bad idea. But... have we had it wrong all along?In this special replay, Tod speaks with Ling-Ling Zo — a PhD candidate at Duke University. Earlier this year, she and her colleagues published an article in the Journal of Marketing called Befriending the Enemy: The Effects of Observing Brand-to-Brand Praise on Consumer Evaluations and Choices..Go Premium! No ads, story links in show notes, deep-dive weekend editions, better quality, live event replays, audio chapters, earlier release time, exclusive marketing discounts, and more! Check out https://todayindigital.com/premiumfeedFor information on advertising, our social media, contact info, and everything else, please go to https://todayindigital.com/shownotesOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hello friends, it's Todd here. A special episode today because we have run into some technical issues. Namely, my laptop has decided to go on strike. Canada's major cell network has been down for hours. I'm assuming a biblical plague of locusts is next. But it turns out this was a good day for it since it was a bit of a slow news day anyway. So in place of today's regular show, the newscast, we are running a special deep dive episode. This originally went out exclusively to our premium members back in January. So it might give you a taste of what you're missing out on. In addition to having no ads in the main daily show, premium members get weekend editions, story links in the show notes, audio chapters and a bunch more.

You can join them at todayindigital.com slash premium feed or tap the link in the show notes. Or if you prefer, you can get the show as a daily email newsletter as well, complete with images, charts, videos, and links to dive deeper. That's at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Okay, on to today's replay. This is a premium exclusive. In 2017, Microsoft's video game brand, Xbox, went onto social media and congratulated its competitor, Nintendo, on the launch of its new Switch console. That same year, the New York Times encouraged people to read other news sources, like the Wall Street Journal. The Oreo cookie brand once told its fans how irresistible the competing Kit Kat chocolate bar was. As marketers, we're taught early on that even the mere mention of the existence of a competitor is a bad idea. But have we had it wrong all this time?

Ling Ling Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University. This month, she and her colleagues published an article in the Journal of Marketing called Befriending the Enemy, the Effects of Observing Brand-to-Brand Praise on Consumer Evaluations and Choices. She joins me now. Welcome. Hi. Can we first talk a bit about the top line findings? Is it a good idea for a brand to praise its competitor by name? Yes. So what we actually find in our studies is that observers who see one brand praising another brand form better impressions of the brand doing the praise. So it results in better brand attitudes towards that brand and increases sales for the praiser brand. I want to talk about sales in a moment, but your research was anchored by two dimensions that

people use to judge others, warmth and competence. Can you talk a bit about both and how they apply to judging brands? Yes. So as you've said, warmth and competence are two of the primary dimensions we use to judge brands when we see them. So warmth is more about the warm and fuzzy feelings that you feel like this brand cares about you, about others, whereas the competence dimension focuses more on the brand's ability to deliver. And so what we find in our project is that brand-to-brand praise increases brand warmth. So you perceive the brand as being more warm and fuzzy

and a brand that you would want to engage with. And what about competence, though? On the competence side, does it bring into question of, I think you're using the term observers, but the people out there who see this brand-to-brand praise, do they perceive that brand doing the praising to be somehow less competent? Is there a scale that you measured on the competency side? Yes. So we do measure competence as well. And we find that this does not harm perceptions of competence at all, which is great. In some studies, we even find that

it increases perceptions of competence as well, although that's not as consistent as the raises and perceptions of warmth. Did your findings come as a surprise to you and your colleagues? It was pretty surprising because it does go against conventional wisdom, right? We see so many attack ads. We never really see as many positive interactions between competitors. Some of the examples you've listed are basically some of the only ones we found from brands who do this. So it was very surprising for us that, you know, viewing positive interaction between brands can, you know, can result in increased impressions of

that brand. One of the things I found interesting in your paper was you pointed to previous research that brand to consumer praise is often seen by consumers in a negative light. So for instance, a sales clerk at a clothing store complimenting a customer on their fashion sense might be perceived as, I don't know, insincere, right? Because they're just trying to make a sale, essentially. Why do you think that skepticism doesn't happen when the praising is between two brands? We know from existing literature, as you've mentioned, that we become skeptical when we feel like the praise is more like flattery, it has an ulterior motive. But when it comes to brand to brand praise, we inherently know that these brands are competitors.

And we know that bringing positive attention to your competitor is a very weird and counterintuitive thing to do. And so we view this action as a very costly action for the praiser. The praiser doesn't necessarily have any obvious benefits from praising a competitor. So because of this perceived costliness, it's kind of able to disarm the more skeptical consumers and showcase that this brand really does care about its relationships with others, which then leads to better, which leads to increased brand warmth and better brand perceptions. So it's the fact that it potentially could cost the brand uh something negative uh you know could cost them in market share whatever is the very reason that consumers find it beneficial yes so the consumers really view it as if this brand is um if this brand is brave enough and cares enough to

actually bring attention to their competitors in a positive light, then this brand must, you know, really be a warm brand, because it's willing to take such costly actions. Did you study at all whether consumers believe the praise? I mean, like, you know, if Oreo goes on and says, well, let's let's use a fictional example, you know, if Oreo goes on and says, well, let's use a fictional example, you know, Burger Chain 1 goes on to Burger Chain 2 and says, you know, hey, Burger Chain 2, that burger looks like it tastes great. Do consumers evaluate in their heads whether or not it actually tastes great? Like, do they believe the accuracy of the messaging or just simply the fact that they did any messaging is what moves the needle? So we didn't exactly measure if consumers believe the message itself. We did measure whether or not they believe that a brand would engage in this type of praise. And in our studies,

so a lot of consumers in our studies didn't actually believe that a brand would actually do this. But when we see in the real world, when we collected some real world data, we do find the positive effects of viewing brand to brand praise. And you know, the difference between studies in the real world is that in the real world, you don't have this issue of believability if it's out there then it's out there um and so while we didn't measure the believability of the actual messages themselves like whether or not you know praising this burger is that burger actually good um we do find in a qualitative study that consumers in general just like the fact that a brand is praising its competitor.

I like the fact that the metric or the criteria is often sort of the costliness. I think that that makes a lot of sense. You have a great example in your paper about the tail of a male peacock. And it's got, you know, as we all know, a very large and colorful tail, which makes it hard to escape from predators. But that costliness of its inability to escape from predators is exactly what attracts females. I thought that was really interesting. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage

today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Can you talk a bit about your methodology? You ran Facebook ads for a fake company. Is that right? Yes. So in that study, we created a Facebook page about a car wash brand. And we tested three sets of ads. And so in that one, we tested an ad where the focal brand, Precision Car Wash, which we made up, praised another brand and congratulated it for winning an award. And another set of ads, we had the vocal car brand Precision Car Wash basically praise itself, compliment itself, like congratulations to us. We won this award. And then in the third condition, we actually had an outsider praise the brand.

So the industry, the committee that was giving the award, we also made a Facebook page for them. So we had the committee congratulate our focal brand, the Precision Car Wash, on winning the award. And from these three sets of ads, we find that it was the ad that showed Precision Car Wash praising another brand that led to the most clicks for the website. Interesting. Obviously, we marketers measure things in terms of sales, you know, clicks are great to get good feelings are great to get. But what we care about is sales. Did you study how praising a competitor might affect purchases? So in this study, consumers saw a one of two tweets from KitKat. So they either saw a tweet where KitKat complimented itself, calling themselves delicious, and another tweet in which KitKat praises competitor Twix. And these were fake?

Yes. So these are fake tweets that we made up and we just told consumers to imagine. So we told participants to imagine that they saw this tweet. Right. And participants were randomly assigned to see either one of those two tweets. And then afterwards, 11 days after,

we followed up with the participants from that study and we asked them if they've made any KitKat or Twix purchases were about 34% more likely to purchase KitKats compared to those in the control condition. And importantly, we find that sales for Twix did not increase at all. So praising a competitor really only boosted the praiser brand and didn't boost the brand who got praised. It seems so counterintuitive. It seems against everything in my marketing body. Yeah, it is really counterintuitive. You can bring positive attention to a competitor, but it actually just boosts your own brand. You suggested that this would work really best for for-profit companies and might not work as well for nonprofit organizations. Why not?

So we inherently view nonprofit organizations as more warm and caring compared to for-profit organizations. And so because nonprofits are already perceived as high in warmth, there's less room for them to grow in that regard. So even if they saw the nonprofit praise another competitor, it gives a less of a boost in the warmth aspect, whereas for-profit brands have more room to grow in the warmth perception. And so seeing a brand praise another brand that are in the for-profit category, that has the biggest impact on brand warmth, which then leads to better consequences. I see. So it's the gap between like the bigger the gap between the perception of warmth that sort of moves the needle.

Right. So the more room there is for growth, the better it is. And that's also kind of why skeptical consumers are also experiencing a bigger effect, because you can imagine if you're skeptical, you're already not that trusting of brands. So there's more room for you to grow in the trust of brands. And so that's why brand to brand praise also has a bigger impact on the skeptical consumers. I thought you answered all these questions very well. You were very succinct. You were very articulate. And I'm hoping that not only do you appreciate that, but that my listeners

therefore believe that I am a better interviewer since I am crazy my interviewee. Do you think maybe it wouldn't carry over? Well, maybe if I said I was a competitor running my own podcast against yours. Fair enough. Ling Ling Zhou is a PhD candidate at Duke University. Ms. Zhou, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. So that will do it for this early summer week. Again, if you want to hear more deep dive interviews with industry experts, marketing scientists and others, the premium podcast feed is your path there. Go to todayindigital.com slash premium feed or tap the link in the show notes.

Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamik First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is the intrepid Steph Gunn, production coordination by Sarah Guild, podcast music licensing by Source Audio, ad coordination by Red Circle. And not many people know this, but our theme composer, Mark Blevis, is actually one of the world's foremost IT experts. And he was helping me, or trying to help me anyway,

get my laptop back up and running today. He always sounded amusing that I named my laptops after flowers. His work one is called Rose. He finally came up with a metaphor to help me understand what was wrong. He said, just like every night has its dawn, just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song,

every rose has its thorn. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. With any luck and this computer being back to normal, I'll see you on Monday. neighbor. Life is good, but time to make it great. To feel the heat, I rise, just ask the baker. It's a good day. A good day to smell the roses while they bloom. Sit up under the stars and hide

at the moon. Let's have a good time. It's my type of life. I'ma live it up.