Comparative advertising-Advantages and Disadvantages

Advertising has become a battlefield for creating unique, cutting-edge, and enticing ways to communicate information to customers to facilitate and positively influence their buying decisions. Important tools include slogans, trade marks, signs and symbols. When advertising is taken to a competitive level, companies tend to promote their products and services by comparing them with those of their competitors to gain consumers' attention and enhance their sales. Comparative advertising takes place either directly, by using the competitor's trade marked products, or indirectly, by making a reference to the competitor's products by insinuation or implication.

Comparative advertising has both advantages and disadvantages for the companies/institutions that use it. Here are the advantages of the comparative advertising: the message and the brand are better kept in mind, detailed and explicit information reduces confusion, improves the product’s perception, gives trustworthy, the buying intentions increase, it promotes competition etc. This kind of advertising is oriented towards the consumer because it advertises not only a product but it also insures the consumers to be well informed.The disadvantages of negative advertising include: decrease of the compared brands` fame (mainly through price comparisons), high promotion costs (the companies whose productsare put in a bad light are forced to reply by developing new advertising campaigns insuring a good positioning of products and reducing the
negative advertising’s effects and which are a lot more expensive), increase of law suits number between different companies due to this type of advertising etc.