Author: Dave J.

Marketing Profs: Combating Trademark Infringement in Search: “the unscrupulous use of a competitor’s trademarked terms is a murky business and contentious topic.” This article specifcally addresses PPC advertising.

The three types of issues:
1. PPC ads that are triggered by your trademarks, but don’t mention them.
2. PPC ads that do mention your brand.
3. PPC ads that are deceptive.

Searching for my company’s brand name, I found the following on Google:

• Two companies offering used and/or rental equipment like we sell
• A business/stock info site offering info on our company
• A ‘type 1’ infringement for one of our less popular products
• Two directory services that I have paid/trial listings for our products, one that mentions our brand, one that doesn’t.

In all, I’m not concerned about any of these. I’ve long-ago accepted PPC ads by used equipment vendors as legit. The ads by the directory services does tell me that I am competing with them for traffic directly, but that discussion is for another post coming soon.

Recently, one of our direct competitors was running a PPC ad that said “Looking for an alternative to X brand”. My assumption is that ad was pulled by Google due to poor click-thrus. Ultimately, I think this may be the ultimate judge and protector.

Recently we’ve been wondering what the legal issues are regarding salespeople who leave with a customer or price list. Seems that a recent legal decision in Illinois says it isn’t a problem unless the information was specifically protected or communicated as confidential. Just being in a proprietary server, for example, is not enough. Here’s a good summary:

Deal Attorney Blog: Password Protected Online Customer Lists Not Trade Secrets:

‘In the case of Liebert Corp. v. Mazur, the Illinois Court of Appeals has held that customer lists stored online in password protected directories were not entitled to trade secret protection where employer did not adequately make employees aware of the lists’ confidential nature…

The court held that ‘[r]estricting access to sensitive information by assigning employees passwords on a need-to-know basis is a step in the right direction.’ This precaution in and of itself, however was not enough. The court was ‘troubled by the failure to either require employees to sign confidentiality agreements, advise employees that its records were confidential, or label the information as confidential.’

Actually, my son Robert has been home for a week. I just wanted to give those of you wondering some closure. Yesterday his eyes started working together! Mostly, anyway. And yesterday he and his brother turned eight.

Can you believe this website is up? I wanted to call their phone number just to see if they are still in business it sucks so bad. Would you tolerate a you company having a ‘web sight’? Sheesh.

www.masterchiller.com

When I was working on my ‘e-commerce certificate’ program at GVSU, I had the most fun doing website reviews. When lining up several sites from the same industry, what works and doesn’t becomes very obvious. While its easy to point out what doesn’t work, it is a whole lot harder to do it right.

So it made me happy to find the April Assembly Lines column by the editor of Chip Scale Review Magazine reviewing the four websites of the ‘billionaire’s club’ of IC packaging foundries. Ron Iscoff, as a print editor, was looking mainly at overall readability and usefulness of the home pages, but as a marketer my concerns are different. So let me do a quick review of my own, in the order he ranked the sites:

1. Amkor Technology has a tiny logo that looks like an afterthought. Dead center is a graphic that doesn’t mean anything with the embedded words “Total Turnkey Technology” and “Quality Solutions”–what waste of prime real estate. The all-caps menu at the top of the page is hard to read, and the fixed-width page feels cramped.
2. Stats ChipPAC site gets hit on by Ron for having just one small picture of their products (and its below the fold). As little content as is on this page, there shouldn’t be a fold, but they eat up about 250 pixels at the top with nothing but a logo and menu. The graphic bar at dead center, like Amkor’s, is useless. And three fuzzy buttons placed hodge-podge on the page make the page hard to quickly digest.
3. Siliconeware is handicapped by a multilingual site, but gets what they do in that critical center spot, showing large IC chips and the words “Flip Chip Packages” in large type. Now if they’d only be smart enough to make the graphic clickable. So the main content choices given to visitors is just news and about us.
4. ASE Global has a home page built in Flash, which ads no value, just glitz. Despite the glitz, the page is boring and has no central focus. The logo is tiny, and the company description takes three lines of text. The page has a vague cloudy graphic with names of their different companies on it, which when clicked, open that website (surprise).

After seeing these sites as a group, it appears that the IC Packaging industry needs websites to share info about the company, and to a lesser extent products. But don’t the investors and engineers visiting want to feel like these companies care about their technology and capabilities? Amkor did the best with it’s “product showcase”, but overall, these home pages seemed as dry and tastless as a rice cake. And if sharing about their company is the primary purpose, why don’t I get a stronger feel of branding?

Looks like this ‘billionaire’s club’ is still using brochureware.

Some blog (I don’t recall who) recently pointed to Andy Haven’s Legal Marketing Blog. I found a couple posts good enough to recommend here:

I remember seeing all the HotOffice ads in Fast Company, what, five years ago during the bubble. Seems like Andy just found them, and is testing them out. He’s really excited about the low cost of entry. Seems like a lot of groupware sites like Intranets.com or Quickbase.com (which I use), now have very pricy rates. Why they insist on ‘per user’ licencing is beyond me, especially for a web product. I want to share my info with everyone, not decide if each rep is going to get $15 a month worth of value. HotOffice is a relatively cheap intra/extranet product that Andy is recommending.

I also enjoyed his post about savetoby.com, the guy who is threatening to kill his bunny if we all don’t pay up. He essentially calls the scam for what it is and indicts it as a crime against humanity (why are those $20K not going to Unicef or Tsunami relief?). Okay, we all knew this stinks and all, but I just thought Andy was pretty convincing (must be the lawyer in him). It probably is an excellent example of the power of The Story, as Seth Godin has been driving home with his Liar’s Blog and book.

I’ve recently learned that when one of your sons looks at you and both eyes aren’t pointing the same way, calmly, but promptly calling his doctor’s office is the right thing to do. Then get ready for an exhausting time.

One of my twin boys, Robert, age 8, woke up sick to his stomach on Saturday, while also complaining about his eye. He spent most of the day laying down, sleeping, and squinting. It wasn’t till Sunday afternoon that he looked at me with both eyes, and thought I was looking at the next Marty Feldman (or for Harry Potter fans, Mad-eye Moody). And I found the reason he was laying around was that he couldn’t walk.

The ER didn’t find anything wrong with a CAT scan, so we were referred to an eye specialist who is booked out till July. But since he had talked to the ER, and my wife pushed his receptionist to talk to him, we got in Monday. He immediately sent him back to the ER for an MRI.

Turns out he as two problems…the eye problem is just a symptom of the real problem:
Symptom: “One and a half syndrome”. Websites on this describe the odd behavior of they eye in a nearly foreign language. This could be caused by any number of brain problems.

Cause: “ADEM” or ” Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis ” which is a form of encephalitis. It usually is a latent reaction to a previous viral infection, but not necessarily, as in Robert’s case. The neurologist says its a lot like a one-time, temporary bought of multiple sclerosis. He says he sees only 10-15 cases a year in Grand Rapids.

Here is a website that talks about ADEM in almost-english.

So, the prognosis is excellent, but he has to spend the week at the hospital getting poked and prodded, plus getting steriod treatments.

Me? Its been an experience. The marketer in me is constantly looking for the poor usability issues in what we’ve gone thru. Mostly they are details…like shouldn’t doctors have business cards they can give you so that you can tell the next doctor who you talked to last? The kid has about 5 different doctors looking after him.

I’ve posted this to help anyone else in my situation learn about these problems and find out they aren’t alone. It is a bit rare, especially to have both. Anyway, back to the hospital.

1. I had a salesperson meet with me to show me their new marketing tool and how it might help my company. He followed up last week and left a VM. I returned the call and left a VM telling him to call me later. Then I pulled out his materials, did some research and decided I didn’t need what he was selling. At least I felt better prepared than if I had received his follow-up call.

When I hadn’t heard from him, I decided to send an email. Its interesting the thought process when a salesperson doesn’t call you. Did he get canned (it is a newer, riskier product), or did he give up, or is he just disorganized? Email seemed a safer way for me to say ‘no’. Besides, I could clearly articulate why, on my terms, without listening to useless counterpitches. His reply: “Can we have a meeting to discuss this?” Now I’ve got to get up the nerve to write back “no”.

2. Our sales manager also recently banned a potential vendor from incoming calls because he thought his product was more important than the work we need to get done. The last straw: he was dumb enough to try to go up to our president.

3. I also went thru my AOL instant messenger buddy list this week, deleting people I no longer ‘need’ to chat with. It gives a stange feeling as you purposefully snuff out an interactive relationship.

B2B selling and marketing is about relationships. But how do we deal with the sticky issue of ending those relationships? Here is an article from Wired on breaking up in this day and age that, while not a step-by-step guide, it does cover a lot of the issues with becoming disconnected from someone…saying goodbye or no.

Wired News: We’ll Always Have ICQ

It takes two minutes to remove someone from your IM lists, even if that person has eight handles across five different clients. You can filter incoming e-mails straight to trash if you don’t want to deal with someone again. You don’t run into your online exes around town.

Online relationships tend to be emotional, because that’s the kind of connection we make when we remove the physical from the equation. But without the physical reminders that someone has left behind — a shared table at the local cafe, the friends you hung out with together, a toothbrush — it’s a hell of a lot easier to get through the emotional upheaval and move on with your life.

If you subscribe to BtoB Magazine, you probably got a survey request in your email. The survey is actually a review of recent full-page ads in their magazine. Check out the survey. You can just skip the survey questions and look at the 17 ads.

While the survey asked the very vague “What message or feeling do you get from this ad?” essay question, I felt compelled to write like one of their own ‘copy chasers’. Man, these ads sucked! Really! Only two I rated as winners, and 2-4 were okay…out of 17. A couple I commented look like they were created in Word. This is a magazine for marketers?

I guess I must normally flip past these ads and not pay attention. Most are selling services or magazine advertising, so having a picture of a real product not realistic. But you figure the exhibit booth vendor would at least have a picture of a show booth in their ad. Or the company selling ads in elevators would focus on explaining their product. The most effective and compelling was the Forbes.com two-page spread in black & white.

Going thru the survey a second time, I see they are rotating the ads in the survey. Click this image to see a full-size sample of suckiness.

A lot of the marketing content I come across is the same stuff…improve your marketing, improve your results. Change your strategy, change your luck. In practice, its nice to talk about, but hard to always pull off. But how about starting a completely new product in a new industry?

So, I felt enlightened by an article in the Grand Rapids Press on Sunday (not on the web), as it told the story of a local company seeking to change its product line. The continued disappearance of manufacturing, especially plastic components like Cascade Engineering makes, caused them to realize they needed to diversify. The strong growth in medical devices seemed attractive, but they had no product to offer. The CEO created a team and sent them out across the country, going to conferences and such. And at an event in California, they came across a potential partner who is just across town here in Grand Rapids.

The story doesn’t really have a happy ending yet. The two companies have had discussions and written contracts, but nothing has been made yet. They are working together on a interim product to get the ball rolling. Its been a year, yet the article talks about Cascade wanting to move ‘quickly’.

“This won’t be the only effort to diversify, he said. His company will make other forays that will be just as complex and time consuming. But at their heart will be the same driving force: The need to keep innovation ahead of the shifting sands of this economy.”

Just a lesson that sometimes marketing takes shoe-leather, introspection, and persistance. Stuff you can’t wrap nicely in a report or PowerPoint!