Epic Mobile Battles: The Doritos vs. Pringles Faceoff

It’s always a contest, always a battle for ultimate supremacy: Denver Broncos vs. the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl 50, USSR vs. USA, perhaps Trump vs. Clinton for leadership of the free world. And now Doritos is posing the epic question that will be answered March 25 in the new Warner Bros. movie: what if Batman and Superman faced off?

Yeah, I know, Superman is straight-up invincible with actual super powers ‒ x-ray vision, titanium tough skin, natural rocket propulsion… And Batman? What’s he got? Just his street smarts from years spent prowling the city in the dark of night, a dose of high tech, and a bad attitude.

But here we want to pose a tastier and certainly less hypothetical question that might thrill the inner marketer in you if not the inner geek. Which wins in a mobile faceoff: Doritos or Pringles? Which is the savviest marketing master of mobile customer experience? Which knows how to pull on the consumer’s heartstrings in order to find a way down their gullet and into their digestive tract?

It’s all about who wins the fight for customer experience. As Raj Subramaniam, Fedex’s EVP of Global Marketing declares, “Customer experience [is] today’s battlefield. … 89 percent of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2016, and the marketing organization is on the hook for delivering the right individual interactions that will define the brand.”

And the stakes are high in the salty snack market. Current valuations put sales in the US at $28.2 billion annually, with potato chips and tortilla chips gobbling 20% and 13% of the sales respectively.

So if we let Pringles stand for the currently dominant potato chips and Doritos front for tortilla chips, who is the master of mobile customer experience.

Without further ado, we present some shocking evidence.

And the master of mobile customer experience is …

At first, Doritos seems to power ahead with its gripping images of bold and ferocious superheroes in a colossal faceoff, while Pringles offer a lighter, more cheery, more appetizing but less mesmerizing scenario. (See the full view on Mobilizer).

But unfortunately, when the chips are down, Doritos takes a fall. On Android device after Android device, Doritos’ website unfortunately fails to perform. And on the iPhone 5c and iPad Mini below the fold, for unknown reasons the words “Epic Prizes” swim in a giant pool of black. Check out the view on Mobilizer here.

The lesson? Never launch a high-profile, expensive marketing campaign without clear visibility into your complete mobile performance. Get a fast, accurate online mobile testing tool that delivers easy visual inspection of your web pages on mobile in addition to critical analytics. For chip companies and indeed all companies fighting for the retail dollar, the battle for customer experience is simply too important to lose.