The temptation for vendors to go negative on their competitors in their marketing material is a troubling trend in advocacy.
Contrasting favorable traits of your own and highlighting inadequacies of one’s opponent is nothing new to politics or advocacy. Opposition or marketing warfare is commonplace in many industries, but the effectiveness of this tactic is highly questionable – particularly in the advocacy space.
The advocacy market doesn’t have a Coke-or-Pepsi battle. You can use this service and that service and couple many things together to build a robust grassroots program. Most advocacy professionals want to know what you can do for me rather than what your opponent can’t do. It’s actually surprising and a bit disappointing to see marketing for one product highlighting the limitations of another.
What if you’re an organization that uses both vendor services? If you’re in this category of organizations deploying two services for different objectives, you’re in the path of collateral damage from this increasing hot marketing warfare. Think of it this way: one of your vendors is attacking your other vendor, which is attacking your advocacy program and your decision to deploy both services.
Now, seeing ads from one company attacking another company certainly makes a splash, but raises the most obvious question of truthfulness and authenticity. For advocacy professionals caught in the crossfire, the “did you see this?” emails are being sent to your confidants to dig deeper into whether or not the attack ad is grounded in fact.
The trend in this type of advertising is to cobble together partial truths and even downright discrepancies of fact in an attempt to win this zero-sum game. Users of the product or service that’s attacked in the ad can immediately verify authenticity – and they can share that opinion with their friends who are potential clients.
Some ads that I have seen recently hold very little validity because you can literally log into your dashboard and complete a task that the ad claims is impossible in a particular system. Conversely, the advertising product or service claims to be able to do everything as if the consumer of information didn’t believe the inherent bias.
Even if the ads were true, there are much better ways to showcase your products that have more credibility and utilize tech in a positive way. I would much rather see display ads with cookies embedded on a thought leadership piece of a successful client case study. Product or service-based marketing warfare isn’t a responsible use of resources.
All in all, it’s better to put time and effort into building your own image up as opposed to bringing others in the market down. Advocacy is a relationship business at the very core. It’s worth remembering that an organization that’s a competitor or unaligned with you now could be a colleague on the same side in the near future.
Joshua Habursky is assistant vice president of advocacy at the Independent Community Bankers of America, chairman of the Grassroots Professional Network, contributing editor to Campaigns & Elections and an adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.