Positioning. One of the first laws of good strategy.

One of the most famous books on strategy is Sun Tzu's "Art of War." Taken at it's simplest it appears to be a short text about doing the opposite of what your "enemy" is doing. That might be enough, but there is more to it. The closer you look, the more precipitous the drop. Let's take a wander, shall we?

Here are our beautiful friends at OBDeleven. We've previously shown how they've been trolling our YouTube content. We've no doubt that they haven't stopped, just gotten more camouflage instead. That is fine, we can take the sniping and low grade guerrilla tactics.

Over Christmas they mobilized large forces, resulting in some territorial gains. They spent quite a bit of effort in advertising on car forums, essentially carpeting potential users with chaff. We say, OK, it's their money and they're doing well here. We do not compete, we applaud their success, because (motive is important) potential customers compare our product to OBDeleven directly.

Sorry for the quality of the image - the source of the information is here (referrals).

So, they're doing well, you might say. If you are of a binary mindset, this is bad for us. Considering that there is a decision to take and money to spend. We don't worry about that, we're happy that there is a level of interest generated in this type of product.

We also noticed a higher interest, (over 576%) in their organic search results. This too seems indicative, considering that they've had a slight decrease in the same results for paid advertising. It goes to show that their search audience is increasing, indicating that the ad spend in other areas is working.
You might notice (above) that Carista is one of their paid adwords. We're used to that tactic too. Again, no drama, we're quite happy with the comparison in any event.

An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind

To recap, our competition has gone on a wild spending spree, casting money to the wind, in an effort to draw attention to their product. They succeeded, but, and it is a big BUT... the position is for Christmas sales.

There is a specificity to Christmas. Most people don't want to spend more than 20 dollars USD on a gift (usually less, considering that other people {in your circle} see your gift too and compare the buying price of your love). 

The price point hardens the bigger your family, or extended family, becomes. More people = less gift.

"Impulse purchase" gifts should be below 20 dollars USD
Marketing 101

This is the key point. When someone looks for an "automotive gift" for their nearest and dearest at Christmas, ...they will only want to pay this amount (or less). Where is our competition priced? $88.92 (at the point of going to print).
What they've done is advertise us. The genii.

I love it when a plan comes together!
Hannibal smith (The A-Team)

As can be seen (above) when people opened their gifts on Christmas day (the large spike on the graph) the product they bought was...

Thanks Guys!

Oh, sorry...what did we do? We dropped our price by 30% from Dec 14th (across the board) all the way till Christmas eve.

Positioning

"Disposition of the Army (Chinese: 軍形) explains the importance of defending existing positions until a commander is capable of advancing from those positions in safety. It teaches commanders the importance of recognizing strategic opportunities, and teaches not to create opportunities for the enemy." Wikipedia.org 

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Sun Tzu