The Good Old-Fashioned Marketing Wars

Companies have fought over their goodwill in the market over the years and have adopted numerous strategies to win those battles.

The fight over who has a great value proposition in the market has always been the market leader in the end.

Pepsi and Coke are the old and well-known examples of this war. They were once together and used to be called PepsiCo. After it split up into two, they have been at each other’s throats since the 1970s.

It started with Pepsi’s challenge in 1975 and it was proud of its taste for years. In 1986, Coke’s new taste turned the odds around. This skirmish has been fought on social media and even in space.

Another great example is Nintendo vs Sega. Sega announced its tagline by directly targeting Nintendo “Genesis does what Nintendo doesn’t”. This enraged a war between the two and this went on for decades from the 1980s to the 2000s.

Sega v/s Super Nintendo

At last, Super Nintendo was victorious but was soon ousted by Microsoft and Sony. Apple and Microsoft went on head-to-head too.

Apple v/s Microsoft

Apple ignited the ground by running an anti-pc campaign in 1984 but Microsoft didn’t respond. Instead, it let HP and Dell hardware manufacturers reply recently.

Sometimes, an innocent tweet can bear a war too such as, BMW and Audi. BMW tweeted a picture of its M4 at the Yas Marina race circuit with fireworks in the background. However, Audi took it personally and retweeted it “When you see it…” BMW in response tweeted “We see it, where we usually do… in the rear-view mirror”.

This war moved on to billboards when Audi mocked BMW and vice versa. This clash finally came to an end with Audi being the winner based on the performance of its S and RS versions of the A series cars.

Firms have continued to rage against each other over the decades. This keeps things interesting, unlike AT&T and T-Mobile.

Where AT&T is suing T-Mobile for publicly defaming it in its campaign. However, Verizon was also the target in this campaign but hasn’t responded in any manner yet.

This shows that AT&T has lost the sense of good old-fashioned marketing clash which used to keep the industry stimulating and consumers even more motivated.