Bad Marketing and False Advertising

Published on Dec 13, 2007   //  Marketing Tips
8

Yesterday I was surfing and found the following Google ad…

I was a bit surprised that someone (a rather large competitor) was actually advertising with our name in the Ad. I immediately saw things wrong with this as a marketing person; If own businesses never ever place your competitors names in your Ads, this means you are now advertising your competitor and not just yourself. The ad only competes on price and not on anything else. If you read our Keys to Success post series you know what competing on price is a recipe for disaster and will eventually put you out of business.

Click on the ad brought me to a page where I could order the $2.99 package. When you choose the features that you want (which of course are included free in your BlueFur packages) the price jumped. Not to mention they added a $10 sign-up and you can only buy yearly. You can see the total price bellow…

 

Our smallest package the Mini Unix is $6.95 a month or $70.89 a year. As you can see the ad clearly is false advertising.

What do you think of this type of advertising?

8 Comments to “Bad Marketing and False Advertising”

  • Nick
    December 13, 2007 2:53 pm

    Free advertising for you! Some people are stupid enough to do that , they just want to get people to see there site.

  • Rock
    December 13, 2007 3:05 pm

    I don’t believe in doing negative advertising toward competitors, especially mentioning a competitors name in an ad. I would rather focus on myself and how I can advertise myself better.

    Just by reading that ad I wouldn’t do business with them because it sounds sleazy and gives me a bad impression about their business.

  • Thinkreferrals
    December 13, 2007 8:01 pm

    If I am surfing and get to their ad, I will say, hmmmmm, cheaper than BlueFur . . . what is this BluFur.com, maybe I should go check before I signup with these guys.

    I’m glad you didn’t advertise them on this post by giving their name.

  • HiFi Guy
    December 14, 2007 4:01 am

    I think you should complain about this faker to adword

  • Webhosty
    December 14, 2007 4:18 pm

    Well, I guess it’s even worse if you have these ads on your own company blog like iPowerWeb has.

    Talk about a recipe for disaster!

  • Brad
    December 19, 2007 6:06 pm

    I would be pretty angry if an advertiser used my URL to advertise their product.
    Adword attack!

  • Matt
    December 19, 2007 10:03 pm

    If you own the trademark for “BlueFur”, you can email Google and they’ll stop displaying sponsered links with your trademark in it…

  • blogadmin
    December 19, 2007 10:04 pm

    Trademark paperwork is already being worked on.

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