It might sound counter-intuitive, but referring to your largest rival in your marketing could be an effective strategy at growing your market share. By running advertising and marketing campaigns that mention only a sole competitor or a competing offer which customers might be familiar with you’re giving your marketing a boost of familiarity. Many comparison campaigns have been ran over the past 40+ years since the U.S. Federal Trade Commission gave the go ahead to brands to advertise direct comparisons.

Not only does this allow you to directly stack your brand, product, or service up to a familiar competitor, but it also allows you to directly influence the ‘evoked set’ a consumer things of when they think about your product or service category. This has enormous potential to block out other competitors from the market giving more market share to your brand which might be taken from other smaller competitors or from the bigger competitor you’re comparing yourself to.

One example of this was the legendary Pepsi Challenge. Not only did it show some Coke drinkers preferred Pepsi but it also failed to mention other similar soda brands like RC Cola and Dr. Pepper, leading to a surge in market share for Pepsi. Another lesser known one was the Bing it On Challenge from 2013 which Microsoft claimed showed consumers preferred Bing’s results 2:1 over Google, while the site is now offline the challenge scored media coverage and allowed Microsoft to showcase their search technology to more people giving them a chance to win mind share and market share.

In practice a simple, practical, way to do this is to create a page with a table comparing your offering to your competitors at the same / similar price levels. Compare yourself only to one competitor per page and have your sales team trained on sending out the right link to a prospect. Even if your prospects are just tire kicking, but running price / service / quality comparisons to another brand they were considering you’ll win yourself into the evoked set as they get closer to making a decision.

Pros vs. Cons
Pros: This strategy will help you build a message your audience will be very likely to digest easily and has potential to gain media coverage further boosting your results.

Cons: There is the very real possibility that you end up helping your competitor grow even larger and they use your marketing as their own marketing.