Archive for 'Marketing Ethics'

Lack of ethics in marketing

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August 05th, 2007.

There are many successful companies that have played by the rules for years. Using word of mouth and great customer service to establish momentum in their marketing efforts. But there are some companies out there that claim to be providing a service for consumers by publishing the truth. These such companies for example are ripoffreport.com and screwedcentral.com.

Companies like those are up for a simple purpose. That purpose is NOT to provide consumer protection, but to use other companies BRAND’s in order to gain profits. ScrewedCentral for example uses Google Adsense and has a “donation page” for their “legal fund”. If you visit Ripoffreport.com you will notice that they also ask for donations for their legal bills and they have ads displayed which are no doubt paying for the ad space. On top of it they have the “advocacy” program which asks companies who have a negative report for a couple thousand dollars in exchange for help in getting reports “turned around”.

What happens is that these websites rank on the top of Google and Yahoo for a company’s name. So when someone is searching for that company they end up on the report website. “Hopefully” these visitors click on the ads when they visit and the report site makes money. It is an old marketing trick. Problem is that these websites are using trademarked names to promote their website. Eventually you would end up upsetting the wrong company who ends up suing your report company for everything it’s worth. Then the site begs for donations to fight in court.

A major problem with the above is that these report sites do not really allow anyone to promote the good. Only the bad. So if a consumer that has done business with a company notices a negative item they cannot write their own good item to be included in the website. The people that own these websites are clearly in it for one thing. Money!

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