Transformation of comparative advertising in the digital age in the context of user-derived content creation and brand advocacy

Advertising, which is an important area of investigation by researchers, is one of the most important factors shaping consumers' purchasing decisions and consumption habits. Advertising, which can be defined in its most general form as promotional activities carried out by purchasing space and time from the media in order to ensure the purchase of a good, service and / or idea, has been a field that has been studied for a long time, especially since the early 2000s. has begun to be evaluated in a context. Factors such as developments in communication technologies, transformation in consumers and the resulting increasingly intense competition are important in the emergence of this situation. Advertising strategies also differ in this process and become more aggressive. It is also possible to talk about different types of advertising that emerge at this stage, one of which is comparative advertising. Advertising, which is an important area of investigation by researchers, is one of the most important factors shaping consumers' purchasing decisions and consumption habits. Advertising, which can be defined in its most general form as promotional activities carried out by purchasing space and time from the media in order to ensure the purchase of a good, service and / or idea, has been a field that has been studied for a long time, especially since the early 2000s. has begun to be evaluated in a context. Factors such as developments in communication technologies, transformation in consumers and the resulting increasingly intense competition are important in the emergence of this situation. Advertising strategies also differ in this process and become more aggressive. It is also possible to talk about different types of advertising that emerge at this stage, one of which is comparative advertising. This type of advertising, which can also be described as an effort by a particular brand to make its own brand superior through direct or indirect comparison by targeting its biggest competitors in the market, is also implemented by many big brands, even though it creates many legal and ethical problems. This research also focuses on this type of advertising and its relationship with advocacy. In this context, in the first part, the concept of comparative advertising, in the second part, the concepts of web 2.0 user-derived content and brand advocacy are evaluated with a literature review, and finally, in the third part, the Nike Betterforit Campaign, Adidas Impossible ls Nothing, Coca Cola Share a Coke and Pepsi The Vending Machine are evaluated with the purposeful sampling method. campaigns and one spec advertisement of each brand are first subjected to descriptive analysis and then analyzed using five different indicator systems identified by Roland Barthes. As a result of the analysis carried out through the meaning systems that Barthes lists as five different sign systems, enigmatic code, connotative code, actional code, symbolic code and cultural or referential code, through which the texts communicate, in order to discover the judgment underlying the entire narrative, the brand and the consumer, who is the advocate, are analyzed. The relationship between them is revealed. In this regard, the relationship between the contents created by the user/consumer and the discourse emerging in comparative advertisements is also examined. Thus, it is attempted to answer the question of how brand advocacy is used in comparative advertising campaigns of brands pursuing a competitive strategy.