Advertising: Aggressive vs. Creative

Does aggressive advertising work? Is it necessary for a product to sell? A lot of people think that the best way to sell a product is to be aggressive, with aggressive advertising we refer to the type of advertising that it’s main focus is to just tell people about the competition’s flaws and doesn 't focus much on the product it’s selling. Focusing on the flaws of the competitor might be a good strategy on paper but doesn’t that seem a bit desperate and dull?, isn’t advertising suppose to be about finding creative and entertaining ways to sell a product?. In a recent example Apple Inc. started their “go beyond vista” campaign trying to persuade consumers to not buy the new windows or a new PC if they needed an upgrade and to simply just get a mac, this was a more direct approach than their more creative and funny campaign “get a mac” which helped boost the sales of their new computers by focusing on their strong parts. Unfortunately for Apple their beyond vista campaign wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped for since according to the website appleinsider.com Microsoft Vista sold more than 20 million copies in it’s first two months, that’s 3 million more than XP did at it’s time and more than the 19 million registered OSX users in the world, looks like aggressiveness didn’t work so well for Apple after all in comparison to their not so aggressive but more creative “get a mac” campaign. So aggressive advertising, does it work? Well sometimes it can, like in the car industry when you have to burn the competition to get noticed as superior or better, is it necessary? Not quite, in the same example of the car industry when Volkswagen introduced their new SUV the Touareg back in 2003 their strategy was making funny ads pointing out that it does what other Volkswagen can’t whit out even mentioning the competition. And now the question is that when the times comes would you use an aggressive approach or would you use a more creative one?.

References: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/go_beyond_vista.html?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535 http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2605 Consulted April 2007