MarketPlace

Negative advertising is not smart strategy

brand

Emphasis on merits of a product builds a strong brand. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH

The move by mobile communication network Orange Kenya to rebrand to Telkom 12 months after the majority shareholder, Orange Group, exited the market and sold its stake to UK Private Equity firm, Helios Investment Partners, concludes an exercise in brand building.

The branding saw Orange move to competitor bashing, in a similar vein as fellow mobile operator Airtel, which is also now withdrawing.

Research shows that marketing through comparisons with market leader is nearly always a failed competitive strategy, versus marketing based on a product’s own merits alone.

In the case of Orange, it began as a minor player in the sector with a mission of growing its market share, which as of December 2016 stood at 7.4 per cent with 2.88 million pre-paid mobile subscriptions.

As it struggled to draw in new customers, it, at one point, moved to a marketing strategy that involved bashing one of its competitor for its allegedly high call rates compared to the deal it was offering.

In the advertisements it ran, Orange Kenya used SIM cards coloured orange to depict itself and green, the corporate colours of Safaricom #ticker:SCOM, to depict its competitor.

It declared that calls made from Orange to the green network cost only Sh3 per minute, at that time, while calls made from the green network to another green network user cost Sh4 per minute.

At that time, Safaricom controlled 70 per cent of the telecoms market with 20 million mobile subscribers. “It is more affordable calling the other network from Orange than calling within that network...,” read the Orange Kenya advertisement.

However, research shows that such a strategy where a brand compares its product offering to another, especially a market leader, does not have any impact on the consumer.

“When a brand compares itself to another it is almost acknowledging the superiority that other brand holds over it and the reason that they are trying to beat them is that they are better than them, especially when price comparisons are made.

“Consumer price perception dictates that an expensive product is considered to be of higher quality than a cheaper one,” said Stella Kimani, a Kenyan brand marketer. Plus when they make competitor the reference point, it is free advertising for them despite its negativity and could trigger consumers’ interest in the brand.”

Indeed, a study on the effectiveness of comparative advertisements, found out that none of the recall of a comparative advertisement, attitude toward the advertisement, the brand, and purchase intention was greatly affected by the intensity of the comparison.

Moreover, as the intensity of the advertisement’s criticism of the market leader increased, its effectiveness stayed relatively consistent.

“Negativity bias theory states that under many conditions negative information is more powerful in affecting attitudes and behaviour than positive information that seems comparably credible and extreme. In the case of comparative advertising, the comparative ad explicitly encourages the consumer to think negatively about the compared to brand, which in turn gives them a relatively more positive attitude toward the comparison brand,” read the study report published in the University of Georgia online library.

“However in our study, this did not hold true. Consumers may not have thought negatively about the brand that was being compared; therefore, they did not think more positively about the comparison brand thus their purchase behaviour will not be affected.”

--African Laughter