Today in Digital Marketing - Why You Should Publicly Praise Your Competitors

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 PhD candidate at Duke University. This month, she and her colleagues published an article in the Journal of Marketing called

Starting point is 00:00:46 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.

Starting point is 00:01:22 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

Starting point is 00:02:12 competence? So does it 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? Yeah, 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.

Starting point is 00:02:48 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, and can result in increased impressions of that brand. One of the things I found interesting in your paper

Starting point is 00:03:28 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?

Starting point is 00:03:53 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 could cost them in market share or whatever. Is the very reason that consumers find it beneficial? If this brand is brave enough and cares enough to actually bring attention to their competitors in a positive light, then this brand must 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 use a fictional example, you know, Burger Chain 1 goes on to Burger Chain 2 and says, you know,

Starting point is 00:05:52 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.

Starting point is 00:06:40 And the difference between studies and 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. 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? We do find in a qualitative study that consumers in general just like the fact that a brand is praising its competitor. 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 I like the fact that the metric or the criteria is often sort of the costliness. I think that makes a lot of sense.

Starting point is 00:07:43 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. 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 focal car brand

Starting point is 00:08:34 precision car wash basically praise itself compliment and sell like congratulations to us we won this award right 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.

Starting point is 00:09:20 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

Starting point is 00:09:48 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 within the past 11 days from when they first took the study. And what we actually find is that consumers who saw the KitKat praising Twix message were about 34% more likely to purchase

Starting point is 00:10:30 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 non-profit organizations. Why not? So we inherently view non-profit organizations as more warm and caring compared to for-profit organizations.

Starting point is 00:11:25 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 of seeing a brand praise another brand um 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 um like the bigger the gap between the the perception of warmth uh that sort of moves the needle right so the more room there is for growth

Starting point is 00:12:20 the better it is and that's also kind 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,

Starting point is 00:12:53 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.

Today in Digital Marketing - Why You Should Publicly Praise Your Competitors

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