---
id: "claim-rivalry-boosts-engagement"
type: "claim"
source_timestamps: ["¶3"]
tags: ["marketing-roi", "consumer-behavior"]
related: ["concept-rivalry-reference-effect"]
confidence: "high"
testable: true
speakers: ["Abhishek Borah", "Johannes Berendt", "Sebastian Uhrich", "Gavin Kilduff"]
sources: ["tail2"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-tail2"
originDay: 2
articleStem: "hbr-tail-124-good-rivalry-brand"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2025/08/a-good-rivalry-can-elevate-your-brand"
sourceTitle: "A Good Rivalry Can Elevate Your Brand"
---
# Rivalry References Significantly Boost Engagement and Purchase Intent

**Claim (confidence: high, testable):** Referencing a rival competitor in marketing messages generates significantly more consumer engagement and higher purchase intentions than mentioning any other, non-rival competitor.

**Evidence base:** An analysis of [[entity-twitter-x|Twitter/X]] data from **100 brands across 20 product categories (2020–2022)** plus controlled experiments with **thousands of U.S. consumers**. The effect is robust across industries — from soft drinks to mobile carriers to sports teams.

**Enrichment validation (strongly supported):** This is the study's central thesis and is corroborated by peer-reviewed and institutional sources. The [[entity-journal-of-marketing-research|Journal of Marketing Research]] paper ('The Rivalry Reference Effect') reports **two archival Twitter studies and three preregistered experiments**; NYU Stern's brief documents analysis of **~1.5M tweets** showing rival-referencing posts get significantly more likes and retweets than posts naming ordinary competitors or none; and the AMA Research Insight reiterates increased engagement with downstream purchase-intention effects. The effect is statistically mediated by **story embeddedness** — the perception that the message is part of an ongoing story. This claim underpins the whole vault; see [[concept-rivalry-reference-effect]].