Boosting brand awareness by advertising competitor brands

The branding short-cut

In 1986 Tommy Hilfiger had a billboard on Times Square in New York that mentioned his brand together with other well-known brands in men’s wear.
It said:

THE 4 GREAT AMERICAN DESIGNERS FOR MEN ARE:
    R . . . L . . . . .
C . . . . . K . . . .
  P . . . . E . . . .
  T . . . . H . . . . . . .

(Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Perry Ellis)

Three months after the campaign was unveiled, a furious Calvin Klein said:
“Do you know it took me twenty years to get to the point where Tommy Hilfiger is today?!”

If you can get your brand name alongside other well-known brand names, it makes it easier for people to know what you product or solution without explaining anything and they will file your brand or product in that category.

Lead generation and CRM sales solutions brands

This made us think: If this has worked for Tommy Hilfiger, it should work for us too.
If we could get our lead generation and sales solution LEADSExplorer listed with other similar solutions, it would help significantly.

This would give something like:

THE 4 GREAT AMERICAN POST-CLICK MARKETING SOLUTIONS ARE:
    L . . . L . . . . .
A . . . . . C . . . . . . . . .
D . . . . . B . . .
   L . . . . E . . . . . . .

The problem is these brands are US based.

We could easily define a European version:
THE 4 GREAT EUROPEAN WEBSITE LEAD GENERATION SOLUTIONS ARE:
       E . N . . . .
W . . . . M . . . .
  W . . . O .
 L . . . . E . . . . . . .

In both cases the brand awareness of our competitors is rather low as this it is still an emerging market.

Thus we could opt for a broader category: CRM Sales solutions
THE 4 BEST CRM SALES SOLUTIONS ARE:
    S . . B . .
S . . . . F . . . .
    A . . !
L . . . . E . . . . . . .

Of course people will argue these are not all On Demand solutions.
THE 4 GREAT ON-DEMAND CRM SOLUTIONS ARE:
S . . . . F . . . .
S . . . . B . . .
      R . L . . . .
L . . . . E . . . . . . .

Even though these brands are much better known as they are in the more popular and widespread CRM business, it will not have the same effect as with Hilfiger. Moreover the CRM is not the core of the business of LEADSExplorer and would give it the wrong branding category.

Advertising: where?

Even with 3 well-known competing brands, where should we advertise and how?
A billboard is out of the question.

On-line seems most obvious as our service is On Demand.
Banner ad: Not very popular anymore as not that effective.
Contextual Ads: Too long for Google Adsense or Text Link Ads.
As we hate Interstitial Adverts (in between pages) or Floating Ads, we won’t use it for lead generation.
Anyhow it won’t be low cost as it needs some space.
 

The competitors of LEADSExplorer
Do you want to know who our competitors are?
Come visit our blog again this week or email us at:  info (at) LEADSExplorer.com

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