In fact, it failed miserably. Sega was utterly squashed by Nintendo in the North American market. Compare this to the European market, where the opposite happened: Sega won the majority of the market, thanks to much edgier sales campaigns.
That’s clearly a case where GM is not the industry leader. Ford, Chevy, and Ram are more popular. GM is trying to show why it is “better” because those are seen as better by reputation/expectation.
Generally, the car brands will competitor name when referring to features their competitor has a reputation for good performance.
Ford has it’s Ecoboost that it’s been pimping forever, so GM says they got better gas mileage than Ecoboost.
If there is a popular expectation/reputation for one brand having best performance, then the other brand will attack that expectation directly. If the brand leads in that performance category reputation, then you don’t need to mention your competitor, you just mention your “best in class” status or whatever.
You can use competitors’ names in ads as much as you want, subject to certain FTC regulations. It’s not an issue of intellectual property, since any trademarks are used correctly (if you use “Ford,” you are referring to Ford Products, so there’s no confusion.)
Why you use them is a complex matter. Old school Madison Ave (up to the Mad Men era and beyond) was that you never mentioned a competitor to give the free publicity. Thus ads in the 50s would refer to “Brand X.” Bufferin represented its competitor, aspirin, by using little "A’s’. Margarine competed against “the high-priced spread.” Avis was number 2 in car rentals, but never mentioned who number 1 was.
In the 60s and 70s, ad agencies started realizing that it was more natural to mention the competitor in your ads; everyone knew who you meant, anyway, so why be coy?
You have to stick with the facts. Thus you can say, “The Dodge has 17% more cargo space than the Ford F150, and gets better gas mileage” if both statements can be documented.
There’s also the “nothing works better” dodge, which you don’t have to back up, since the FTC has rules it means “they all work the same.” So you can say “nothing works better than Tyelenol – not Bayer, not Advil, not Motrin.” However, if you say “Advil works better than Motrin,” you’d better have the facts to back that up.
So if one brand thinks it’s to their advantage to mention a competitor, they will; if they think it doesn’t help, they won’t.
Another thing is that it’s really hard to come up with a campaign where you directly mention/attack a competitor without sounding like a petulant brat in a schoolyard name calling contest.
I’m sure that there’s someone out there that likes the whole MS/Google Scroogled thing, but no one in groups I hang out with will admit to it.
I vaguely recall that when I was a kid in the 50s, it was actually illegal to use a competitor’s name, even a competing type of product. I remember a commercial for some kind of margarine that had to refer to butter as “the high-priced spread.”