Today’s companies have to innovate better and novel strategies to have an edge over their rivals. In their endeavor to attract customers, make profits and build their brands, they have to show themselves as being better than their contenders. Marketing is a war among the brands and comparative advertising is a platform to display the superiority of their products and services in comparison to their competitors in the market.

Comparative advertising is proving to be the best strategy for both marketers and advertisers in the current global recession period. Hard times call for hard strategies and today's companies are vying in for better and novel strategies to have an edge over their rivals. The Horlicks- Complan advertisement launched during the last quarter of the year 2008 has once again brought comparative advertising into the vanguard. In this advertisement, Horlicks, GlaxoSmithKline's health drink, has directly hit the nail with its ad comparing its nutritional value with that of the Heinz India's Health drink, Complan. Horlicks directly claimed that its drink was more nutritional and priced low than its rival Complan. (Refer Exhibit 1 for complete details of the ad). Complan responded very quickly to the ad of Horlicks and proved the superiority of its pricing. Complan in December 2008 launched an aggressive direct comparative ad targeting Horlicks. In its ad, Complan compared its attributes with Horlicks and demanded an action from the customers to choose among the "low-cost health drink" and "Complete Growth". In another case, Sprint, a telecommunication company, has planned to launch an ad that would effectively help it to combat the iPhone in the market by displaying the comparative advantages of both. Of late, this strategy has emerged as one of the best methods in promoting products.

No two brands are alike and so comparative advertising helps the advertisers and marketers to enter a battleground and sell their products. This phenomenon has caught fire among all categories of products and services. The ad of Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts has also put forth the significance of comparative advertising when the latter company has claimed "its customers who are more hardworking people prefer their coffee over the high priced Starbucks, the elitist coffee." This makes clear that comparative advertising is an effective tool to bash the rival brands. Refer Exhibit 2. Comparative advertising is not a new concept and many experts have defined it in several ways, however the essence of it lies in its name. It is a form of advertising where a firm advertises its products by judging them against the products or services of another firm. The latter party is usually its opponent in the market in the similar trade. The basic motive behind this kind of advertising is to gain market share over the rival by comparing the superiority of both the products in terms of quality, price and certain features as prescribed under the law. The comparative ad is usually designed to influence and convince the users of the competing brands to change over to the sponsored brands or at least to get them to know their product as a substitute when the customer plans to purchase a similar type of product in future. Further, "Comparative advertising is an advertising argumentation technique where the advertising message is about making comparisons (necessarily objective) about features (quality, price, delivery terms, services and others) of a company's products as compared to the products of the same type belonging to one/several competitors."

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