In law there is a philosophy that you are never supposed to ask a question of a witness without knowing exactly what their response will be. I mean you don’t want to give them any room to hurt your case by opening the door to an answer you did not want. So this week when I got sent the following image depicting a BMW response to an Audi advertisement I couldn’t help but think the same philosophy seems like a pretty good attitude to take in marketing as well.

Let’s take a minute to think about the Audi advertisement – they obviously were taking a shot at their rivals at BMW but I am quite certain nobody involved in planning this billboard expected BMW to hit back with such an amazing response. So the question then becomes should they have had the foresight and even if they did not how can Audi now respond when they have so clearly been “pwned” by BMW?

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On the foresight question, I guess you could easily argue that whenever you attack a competitor directly (and go so far as to mention their name in your ad) you are not only inviting a response but actually baiting the competitor. So to say that Audi should have been surprised by the fact that BMW responded would be a mistake, it’s just that I don’t think they expected BMW to be as clever as they were.

So now say you’re an Audi executive or on the marketing team that decided to put up the Audi billboard in the first place, since you have clearly been schooled by the marketers at BMW what to do? Doing nothing only reiterates the fact that BMW has won this round. Taking down the Audi billboard (so the BMW one is left with no context) would just invite BMW to purchase the now Audi space and use it to give context to their “Checkmate” billboard.

So clearly there is a need to do something but what?

I think if I was placed in the situation of Audi I would admit my loss on this one and immediately replace the current billboard with something that made reference to the fact that BMW must have a complex to need to buy such a big billboard – maybe I would reference that Audi is subtle luxury while BMW feels the need to be in your face. Or maybe I would have learned my lesson and decide that rather than attack a competitor I should just come up with something creative about my own brand. Regardless I wouldn’t allow BMW to own me on that street for longer than it took to write this post.

If you were in this situation, what would your response be?


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