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Positioning against an enemy brand is a powerful yet under-utilised approach in marketing, writes Mark Ritson.
This article originally appeared in The Versus Issue, our latest issue of Marketing magazine.
A museum guide is showing people around a set of dusty old exhibits and there, behind a red rope barrier, is a large university building.
“Traditional MBAs belong in a museum,” the ad goes on to claim. “Choose the MBA for today’s working adults.” The ad, shown as a prominent display ad on LinkedIn for the online education brand Australian Institute of Business, is easily the most offensive ad of the year for business school professors like me who actually work at a university.
But it demonstrates an important and often overlooked success strategy for good brand positioning – take an enemy and position against them. Hard.
Too often marketers are too gentle to countenance such a move. They are more than happy to mine their own company’s advantages for possible positioning fodder and conformable trying to understand and then exceed customer needs. But when it comes to competitors, there is often reticence to call out their rivals and openly and repeatedly slight them.
That’s a shame because there are two ways to position a brand: about and versus. In the ‘about’ approach we promote the features and, occasionally, the benefits of our brand to target customers. Positioning is all about the company C, us, and the customer C, them.
In the other approach, the less common ‘versus’ approach, we still focus on what the customer wants that we can deliver. However, to communicate the message more strongly, we pick out a specific competitor and position our brand against them as overly and aggressively as possible. The point of the ‘versus’ positioning is not simply to aggressively slight your rivals; it’s more nuanced than that.
The versus position is one in which we make it clear what we stand for to customers by highlighting the differences between ourselves and others.
When I first met the future Mrs Ritson, for example, I realised it would be impossible to convince her I was a decent man, so I picked a very specific asshole she could not stand and made it clear I did not like him either. Sometimes the best way to explain who you are and what you offer is to contrast yourself with another.
The most famous exemplar of the ‘versus’ school of positioning was the Avis advertising of the early sixties. When Warren Avis set up his car rental business in the 1940s he did so by focusing on an unusual niche: offering rental cars at airports. Hertz, which had been established three decades earlier at the beginning of the automotive era, had traditionally offered its rental cars within the CBD areas of most cities.
Eventually, however, as air travel increased, Hertz matched the Avis strategy with its own airport locations and the two rental firms evolved together. But the first-mover advantage of Hertz ensured it was the more successful brand enjoying double the market share of its smaller competitor Avis.
Until, that is, one fateful afternoon in 1962 when the leadership team at Avis walked into the Manhattan headquarters of legendary advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. Seemingly at a loss as
to how to position Avis successfully in a market that was dominated by Hertz, the agency decided to position against them instead.
“When you’re only No 2, you try harder,” went the new strapline and a legendary ad campaign was born.
Over on the other side of town…
