Imagine: you might be answerable for marketing for a big automobile manufacturer, and your biggest competitor has just canceled 1000’s of vehicles. Now customers are fearful about the safety of cars like yours. Do you employ the moment and increase advertising to steal market share? Or possibly you might be withdrawing ads, fearing that customers will connect your brand with Bad Press?
What for Marketing professors like me Call “substitute brands”, this sort of dilemma appears all the time. Regardless of whether it is a product withdrawal, violation of customer data or a scandal, bad news for one brand can shake customers’ confidence in the entire product category.
Big query: should competitors answer, increasing or decreasing advertising? Will these corrections help or hurt sales?
At first glance, the answer could appear obvious. More advertising expenses should mean a bigger market share, right? But reality is more complex. IN Last examination Looking at how 62 automobile brands reacted to the withdrawal in 2014, my colleagues and I discovered that on average, when the competing brand publishes, its competitors reduced the expenditure on advertising by half. In other words, most brands treat the rival’s crisis as a threat, not a chance.
And when we checked out the content of the ads, we saw something much more interesting. When the competing brand tripped, we found that the substitutes increased their advertising focused on a median price by 25%, probably to draw transaction seekers. At the same time, they cut out an advertising focused on quality by 71%, perhaps to avoid unwanted comparisons.
Here is Kicker: this strategy works.
We discovered the average withdrawal of a rival, which increases the monthly sales of the substitute by 35.3% – and the more the brand withdraws the advertising expenses, the greater the effect. So, when a competitor is due, the best answer is not necessarily to shout louder. Instead, the data suggest a wiser game: spend strategically, deal with price messages and avoid being attentive to quality comparisons.
How we did our work
To understand how the brands react when the competitor is in the face of crisis, we focused on real cases: Reminder of Volkswagen Of the almost half 1,000,000 cars marked under the Sagitar model in October 2014, this gave a really perfect opportunity to look at how competitive brands adapted their advertising strategies.
We identified Sagitar-62 substitute models, other sedans in class A category, sold by over 30 manufacturers-we collected data on sales and advertising expenses on 308 media markets in months before and after withdrawal. Then we conducted a statistical evaluation, controlling several other variables that would affect AD.
Why does it matter
Earlier research offers mixed suggestions About how a substitute brand should adapt advertising expenses after a rival’s marketing crisis. Anecdotal evidence It is also mixed from the automotive industry and consumer goods. For example, after Samsung remembered the galaxy 7 in 2016, on account of defective batteries competing with foni They aggressively increased the commercial trying Increase their market share.
Similarly, in 2010, after the withdrawal of Toyota, he offered General Motors Encouragement for Toyota owners to change to GM automobile. GM marketing director set these encouragements As a way of GM, they suggest a gathering with the desire for automobile buyers for peace and reports GM and others compete for the sale of automobile manufacturers After reminding Toyota.
But my team’s research suggests that such a strategy will not be the best. Sometimes saying that he speaks less.