Not quite. The Pepsi Challenge is more of a balanced approach. The key measure of a good soft drink is its taste. The Pepsi challenge compares both products and then emphasizes Pepsi's stronger appeal to taste-testers. ...I just believe that marketing is more effective if (at a minimum) you spend an equal amount of time emphasizing your product's strengths as you do emphasizing your competitor's weaknesses. Focus on selling a good alternative.
To each his own, but when it comes to expensive electronics, I'm all about the functionality/feature set. I think Apple's got enough creativity and quality in their products, they don't have to spend all their time dogging the competition.
Except that the Pepsi Challenge was actually a hoax. The trick was that booths had filled Pepsi in both the Pepsi AND Coke bottles, and then whichever one you selected as the better tasting one of the two, they'd grab the bottle marked "Pepsi" to show that's the one you chose.
The big mistake that Coca-Cola made was they had misinterpreted the resulting data. Sales of Pepsi did not go up sharply because of anything to do with the formula... It had to do with the PepsiCo's aggressive boost in advertising expenditures. Coca-Cola therefore misattributed the cause and then attempted to launch New Coke with a sweetened formula to compete with Pepsi. This proved to be a colossal failure because in the end there was no real evidence that the Pepsi formula was actually preferred by customers over what is now Coca-Cola Classic.
The additional mistake made by Coca-Cola is that studies show that whenever a brand leader compares themselves to the subordinate competition, the subordinate competition gains more sales than they do... out of sheer product exposure.
Therefore it is regarded today as marketing sense to follow the strategy of independent differentiation where the product is marketed on its own attributes and never compared to other brands. 2nd or 3rd place brands do better, according to the same studies, when they
do compare themselves to superior brands to gain some credibility by sheer association and comparison to show what they have to offer that is similar to the leading brand.
In Apple's case, they have nothing to lose to compare themselves to Vista because they are not the leading brand in terms of overall volume. Doubly well for them is that they are the leading brand in terms of customer perception of quality... and so by chiding Vista they are exposing its weaknesses, not theirs, and doing so without giving Microsoft any measurable increase in advertising exposure that they don't already have.
Apple can't even fail by trying to make OS X more like Vista, because they have such little market share as it is. Windows, however, could fail by trying to emulate the style and functionality of OS X, which they did with Vista... and it exposes their mediocrity as a developer of user interfaces.
