Guest Blogger
Some brands and manufacturers inspire a great deal of loyalty from the people who buy their products. In the last few decades, these arguments have been intensified by the internet, but even several decades ago, who you bought from was as important as the football teams your supported and maybe even who you voted for. Sometimes the loyal were a tiny voice against the indifference of the mass market. Other times, companies would play on their rivalries in how they advertised to their customers. Here then, are five of the most famous brand loyalty battles:
VHS vs Betamax
More a format war than a brand loyalty war, the VHS versus Betamax battle was still notable for how it would pattern out similar wars with later electronics. It’s a classic case of an obscure manufacturer’s affordable alternative winning against the established name’s superior but expensive effort. JVC’s VHS was the former (though its superior recording time was a deal maker with Hollywood studios) and Sony’s Betamax was the later (and a now infamous flop). Was brand loyalty involved? Rest assured that Betamax’s supporters were very vocal about its superior picture quality, even if the masses who got behind VHS had little to say in return.
Winner: VHS, and by a country mile. It lasted about twenty years longer in the west (Betamax lasted quite a bit longer in Japan, where later advances resulted in DVD quality recordings).
Microsoft versus Apple
Even in the time before Apple products weren’t the coolest thing you could possibly own, Apple products had their fanatical fans. They also had fierce opponents. It wasn’t that Windows PCs were better than Apple Macs: it was that Apple Macs weren’t better than Windows PCs. But they were priced as if they were, and their advocates would certainly tell you they were.
Winner: Where to draw the line with this one? There’s no question that Apple completely failed to capture the imagination of the Business PC market, and they only ever succeeded in capturing a limited market share among consumers. But the battle of the brands? Microsoft simply isn’t comparable to Apple in terms of loyalty. In the long game, Apple has found a niche in mobile devices that has defined an industry. But Microsoft has made waves in the video games market too. Both are redefining computing. And though Apple’s annual profits have gone stratospheric, only a fool would declare this one over.
Netscape versus Internet Explorer
The thing with the Microsoft brand is that it’s ‘just kind of there’. You buy a PC and you get Windows. And once internet browsing became an essential feature of new operating systems, you bought a PC and Internet Explorer greeted you. But in 1995, virtually everyone was using Netscape. Entirely free and a favorite of the tech-savvy, Netscape was ahead in implementing internet standards. But Internet Explorer wasn’t just ‘already on’ your PC, it was a mandatory install. And an entire generation of internet users came to assume that ‘Internet Explorer’ was synonymous with ‘the Internet’.
Winner: Microsoft definitively won this one, but I think most net users are thankful that the tactics they used to get there have caused a backlash that has given us Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. IE still dominates, but at least there are choices!
SEGA vs Nintendo
The main players keep changing, but you can always count on there being a video game console war. In the modern day, brand rivalries spill over into blog comments and forums, with legions of teenagers (and young people who should know better) protecting the tribe against allegations that their machine has ‘no games’ or is prone to regular and catastrophic hardware failure. But the pinnacle of these wars was surely the early nineties battle between SEGA and Nintendo: played out with plenty of smack-talking (Only Genesis has “Blast Processing” apparently) and peripheral merchandising growing the brands.
Winner: As a SEGA kid, it’s sad to admit it, but Nintendo won this one. Not because of the sales figures: Nintendo sold 49 million SNES consoles, SEGA 40 million Mega Drives (so, both ‘won’). But because of the immediate aftermath. The Mega Drive turned out to be SEGA’s five minutes of fame: Only around 10 million SEGA Saturns and Dreamcasts were sold, and even their mascot wheezed into old age whilst Mario, Zelda and a widening pool of Nintendo names starred in games that defined their generations.
Pepsi vs Coke
The SEGA versus Nintendo battle was just a small part of a battle that had been raging for some time: a battle for the ever ballooning disposable income of a teenager (and younger audience). It’s rather poetic that Nintendo was red and SEGA blue: the red versus blue battle had already been raging between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola for much of the preceding decade. Between them, they funded rock-star drug habits for decades by appealing to youngsters and promoting themselves as the coolest drink on the market. Well, until you reached the legal drinking age.
Winner: There can be little doubt that Coca-Cola won in the long run. Sales of both regular and diet coke are ahead of Pepsi now, and blue has had to rebrand to stay relevant. This constant state of catch-up was the whole point of the cola wars anyway: though the celebrity arms race was practiced by both sides, it was always Pepsi with the outright smack talk. Pepsi was ‘the choice of a new generation’ (for several generations), using blind taste challenges and purchasing incentives to cajole people into not buying Coca Cola. Sometimes, telling people to break their habits just reinforces those habits.
Steph Wood is a blogger with an eye for design, writing for Solopress, UK-based providers of business cards and postcard printing for many modern brands.