Go Predatory… With Class, Elegance And Dignity

You may remember the Get a Mac campaign from a few years ago created for Apple:

John Hodgman is the PC, depicted as a dishevelled, clueless, boring, old-fashioned man in a poorly fitted suit:

By his side there is Justin Long, just a regular everyday normal guy; calm and laid back, but with a hint of smugness and superiority. A Mac:

The PC is portrayed as an incompetent buffoon, while the Mac is always there to help or just to sit back and feel good about himself. In a nutshell, the Mac is portrayed as always being better.

This lengthy worldwide TV campaign (which dragged on from 2006 - 2009) shows how Apple's use of comparative advertising against Windows, the market leader at the time, increased its sales by 39% for the financial year ending Sept 06, together with heightened consumer awareness.

Being predatory works. But where can you go wrong?

In 2008 Windows replied to Apple's aggressive campaign with I'm a PC:

The irony behind this $300M campaign is that the ads were produced using Mac computers using Adobe CS3. #Fail

I much prefer the ad Windows released last year, which compares its Surface RT to an iPad:

It is evident that in a dog-eat-dog market like today we need to be predatory with our competitors, but the best way to do it is with class, elegance and dignity. You want to avoid negativity, and win over your competitors' followers with honesty and truth and of course, a bit of humour doesn't hurt either!

Domenico De Rosa – Creative Producer at Step Change Marketing