Corporate Rivalry

While it's on my mind I just thought I'd post up some thoughts on advertising in the present day. Ine recent weeks I've noticed that a lot of companies in their ads are making a lot of references to their competitors and how they are better than them.

ASDA are frequently doing this, showing how many 'cheaper' prices Tesco has and then demonstrating how they are cheaper on twice as many products or whatever. Another is Huggies natural fit nappies - which specifically compare themselves to Pampers active fit (possible name/company mix up here) and show how they are better. A recent example is of sports starts causing havoc as they urge men to replace their Mach 5 with a better Gilette Fusion (I've just thought that Mach 5 might be a Gillette product, but it's odd all the same) and so on and so forth.

I'd always thought it some kind of unwritten (or more likely an actual written) law that you could not directly slander or discredit or mention your competitor in advertising your own product and I don't seem to remember any adverts of the kind until recent times. So has there been a change in legislation, have companies just got bolder or has this always been going on under my nose? If you know do drop a comment - I might do some more digging when I've got the time, but while it's puzzling me I figured I'd post it up.

Word of the post: Qwerty –adjective

of or pertaining to a keyboard having the keys in traditional typewriter arrangement, with the letters q, w, e, r, t, and y being the first six of the top row of alphabetic characters, starting from the left side.