Sometimes, attack the competition; one marketing lesson from DuckDuckGo
By Deborah Olusegun
One of the cardinal laws when it comes to marketing and copywriting is to never attack the competition.
We’re told to list all the great features and benefits of the products we write about; find the unique selling proposition or as I like to call it, the unique selling point and whatnot.
But keep the competition’s name out of your mouth.
Well, in most cases this is great advice, but maybe not always.
In fact, Duck Duck Go makes a show of attacking the competition, Google and Facebook (now called Meta).
This internet privacy company does not keep its competition name out of its mouth and so far, it seems to be working out.
If you’re patient enough to search its Twitter page for ‘Chrome,’ ‘Google,’ and ‘Facebook,’ you’ll come across tweets made as far back as 2015 criticizing the privacy policies of these companies.
The first Duck Duck Go Twitter ad I saw categorically stated that I shouldn’t trust Google Chrome when it said it wasn’t stealing my data while I browsed in incognito mode because it was in fact stealing my data.
So I went to their page to do a little browsing.
A typical tweet goes something like, “Do you know Facebook/Meta is a liar and Google Chrome is the devil? We don’t harvest your data the way they do, in fact, it’s like you were never there when you browse with us.”
Well, users aren’t confusing this privacy company for their competition. I say this because this is touted to be one of the greatest disadvantages of picking on the competition.
In one tweet, Duck Duck Go says, “Don’t use Chrome.”
Research shows that the company’s user base has grown over the years.
This lesser-evil marketing style has seen Duck Duck Go’s search market share increase to 2.6 percent in 2020 from 1.25 percent in 2019. The company has over 80 million users and was worth $901 million in 2021.
So, in essence, their marketing style is:
- Put down others like us who don’t value user’s privacy
- Present ourselves as the Knight who saves the user’s day!
Another brand that used this method is Disco Skincare for Men. It isn’t as bold but it disses any other skin product that says it’s unisex.
It focuses on men’s skin.
In one of its email automation, it goes after skincare brands, encouraging the user to go to malls and check out the ingredients in the ‘so-called unisex’ skin products and compare with the regular ones and other women’s skin products.
Its argument is that only the packaging is different and those unisex products do nothing for the men who use them.; but Disco, on the other hand, is up to the task.
Note of warning though — this approach won’t always work.
Pepsi tried it with Coca Cola and it wasn’t a good look for the brand because of the way the latter responded.
When I made this post on LinkedIn, someone in my network said that we could not confirm the success or failure of Pepsi dissing Coca-Cola until the numbers showed themselves.
But it was quite embarrassing for Pepsi when Coca-Cola responded.
One reason it works so well for Duck Duck Go is that it’s the only app that respects users’ privacy when they browse the internet.
And in a world where information keeps getting stolen by Big Corp and they only care about the money, this approach is a big deal. The same goes for Disco, only this time it’s skincare.
