COMPARATIVE APPOACH IN MESSAGE STRATEGY
             Comparative advertising refers to the practice of either directly or indirectly naming one or more competitors in an ad and usually making a comparison on one or more specific product or service attributes. Such other party is usually his competitor and is often the market leader in the particular trade. The comparison is made with a view towards increasing the sales of the advertiser. This is typically done by either suggesting that the advertiser's product is of the same or a superior quality to that of the compared product or by denigrating the quality of the compared product
             In a typical comparative advertising, the advertiser claims superiority over a leading competitor (identified or unidentified) based on how superior the advertised brand is on an important attribute. For example, in the Pepsi challenge, Pepsi highlights its superiority over Coke by stating that more people preferred Pepsi over Coke in a recent taste test. The underlying principle is to differentiate the advertised brand from competition by demonstrating that it has better performance characteristics. Operationally, several comparison formats are used for communicating the claim such as direct comparisons, indirect comparisons or general superiority comparisons.
             Direct comparisons are more likely to differentiate the advertised brand from comparison brand by lowering the perceptions of the comparison brand when the featured attribute was typical of the category and the advertised brand was familiar. (pepsi and coke).It appears that when the direct comparative ad explicitly states that the comparison brand is relatively inferior on a typical attribute, it is more effective in lowering the perceptions of the comparison brand in the direct comparison strategy, the advertised brand may be explicitly compared with the comparison brand by stating that the latter is inferior on an important attribute (e.g., Pepsi vs. Coke ...