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Why Congratulating Your Rival Could Be a Good Move

, by Gaia Rubera - ordinaria presso il Dipartimento di marketing, translated by Alex Foti
Twitter amplifies the visibility of brands that talk to each other, even if their conversation is only superficially civil. Competing products use bland compliments in an attempt to piggy-back on the other company's announcements and win the re-tweet war

Twitter has not only changed the way brands interact with consumers, but also the way they interact with each other, to the point that even historically rival brands are now congratulating each other.

Take the case of Sony and Microsoft: a few months ago, they both launched new, eight-generation gaming platforms – PlayStation4 (PS4) for Sony, and Xbox One for Microsoft. Surprisingly, rather than the classic marketing campaign aimed at highlighting the advantages of one's product with respect to the market competition, the two brands decided to bury the hatchet on Twitter. On November 15, 2013, the day the PS4 gaming console was launched in the US, Xbox tweeted:

Congrats @Playstation. From, #Xbox.

Sony returned the courtesy the day of the launch of the new Xbox, a week later:

Congrats, @Xbox @Microsoft! #NextGeneration #GreatnessAwaits

By mentioning the name of its arch-rival, Xbox first, and then PlayStation, has advertised the competitor's product to its own group of followers. Under the current logic of cut-throat competition, advertising rival products might seem totally senseless. What's then behind this exchange of niceties? Does Twitter foster goodwill? Not at all.

Comparing the number of retweets (RTs) on Xbox's congratulating tweet (23,000) with the number of times the tweet announcing the new PS4 was retweeted (6,000) helps us unveil Xbox's actual intent. By congratulating Sony, Microsoft obtained for its Xbox 22 times more views than Sony's tweet launching the new PlayStation. Thus Xbox managed to steal the scene on the very day the rival launched its new console. Thus a week later, PlayStation tried to repay Xbox in kind. That there was no peaceful intent is revealed by the concluding hashtags it used, such as #GreatnessAwaits, which is the slogan used to support the launch of PS4.

The exchange of tweets also had another important effect: the exclusion of the third great rival, Nintendo with its WiiU console. While Xbox and PlayStation legitimized each other as the only two consoles worthy of their names, Wii was not even mentioned, as if the two giants wanted to let consumers know that WiiU was not even worth considering.

This case, similar to other interactions between rival brands, such as Priceline and Orbitz, or Kit Kat and Oreo, shows that social networks, and Twitter in particular, require deep changes in our traditional frames of mind. Also, congratulating your rivals can turn out to be a winning strategy.

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