The Email Wars

It is not very often that I see an email that is meant to challenge and deflate the market factors hitting a competitor. Could you imaging a brand like Starbucks using email to say, “Dunkin Donuts Coffee not good enough for you? You should try ours.” I could not fathom a brand using email to build a campaign around the failures of another brand, but maybe that is where the business world is heading now. When their is market share erosion and brand fears just add email to get the word out. 

Now this is not something that I would recommend to you to use in your programs. Why? Well it is just a poor practice to leverage the weaknesses of another for your gain as a marketing message. Now I know some business professionals might disagree with this practice, as it can gain market share, but it does not gain brand/mindshare. To me it actually places your brand in a place that devalues your own value proposition and weakens your marketing plans.

What you can do is this. Use the weaknesses you know about from your competition and highlight your strengths and how they address these challenges. Use your own brand positioning to educate and show how you are doing better than others in your market niche. Use examples of good customer success stories that illustrate how your products, programs, or services deliver the best experience for your loyal customers. 

If you look past the header purple image that I have circled you will see that they do the right thing after the fact. But they could have taken the high road to begin with.

Show your value not the short comings of your competition, and never call them out by name. 

UPDATE: So after I wrote this DHL announced that they were suspending all US deliveries. So maybe the email was timely. Maybe FedEx knows more than us and was being helpful. 

Here is what they sent out today that I wanted to add to this post.