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Negative Comparative Advertising: When Marketers Attack

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Marketing Metaphors and Metamorphosis

Abstract

Advertisements that directly or indirectly compare or associate a marketer’s products with those of an identifiable competitor on the basis of some relatively specific point of difference are called, appropriately enough, comparative ads. Gaining widespread acceptance in the early 1970s, their use had previously been rare among mainstream marketers. However, by the mid-1980s, it was obvious, in the US at least, that comparative advertising had become one of mainstream marketing’s most frequently used advertising strategies.

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Beard, F. (2008). Negative Comparative Advertising: When Marketers Attack. In: Kitchen, P.J. (eds) Marketing Metaphors and Metamorphosis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230227538_10

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