Should You Fight Fair?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair#Publicity

Generally, I would be opposed to such a tactic. A company could be misrepresenting a product through false advertising; it would be hard to prove, but if it could be proven without a doubt, then the public would benefit by it's revelation.

As long as there aren't any outright lies involved, why not?

Personally, I buy products based on their own merit. If a company is spending advertising dollars blasting the competition, to me it reveals a general sense of insecurity in regard to their own product.

Sure would be nice if politicians got that memo. Maybe we would be able to elect winners instead of choosing who the lesser loser is.

Generally negative advertising backfires in the long run by making people suspicious of the motives of the advertiser. This has proved true in political advertisements as well as the marketplace. I would not dwell on the shortcomings of my competitor and simply promote the best features of my product.

If you want to highlight the advantages of your product, you could compare it to some unidentified "Brand X", rather than name any specific competition.

(We're number two--we try harder.)

If the competition is good at what they do, then the general public should be able to see through the advertising.

Sadly the general public isn't that smart, lets face it, it doesn't really matter who RG puts it into it does not effect anyone of us, but their is a large part of the general public that would buy the papers to read about it, so the papers dig and publish it.

The same goes for advertising, if you turn around and say company B does X, even if X is impossible, you will find that you get a fair amount of people who think it is true, thus company B suffers and you profit.