I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…

Thank you for reading my article and for the mention.

Business is business. We send out legal letters because we made our brand name a very strong trademark. The name of the company is not considered to be “English language” that you can’t trademark. Our competitors on the other hand did not do a good job with their brand names.

Those that did …. well, we have not received any legal papers from them.

Believe me. We are a legitimate company that has been doing business for the last 30 years. We do believe in high standards of service and stay away from schemes or anything else that could damage our image.

Bidding on our competitor brand names is not fraud. It’s just a tactic that gives us extra 30% of company revenue.

If what we are doing is legal and/OR not being addressed by our competition, why should we NOT capitalize on that?

Thank you for your comment. I think we need to distinguish between using the brand of a competitor in your ads, and then bidding on the trademark or brand names of your competitor as keyword in your PPC campaigns. I do not have a problem using the name of your competitor in ad copy, that is done frequently. I personally don’t like it, but I don’t think there is anything inherently unethical with the practice. However, I do have a problem when companies bid on brand names of their competitor’s as keywords in hopes of gaining traffic from an organic search for that specific brand name. If I type “iPod” in a SE, then I would expect to see domains that sell, or discuss the iPod. However, in the Paid Ads I would hope to not see an online store that only sells Zunes, present because they bid on the keyword “iPod” and are willing to pay for the clicks. That is what I consider unethical.

Thanks for reading.

Aaron

Although I would definitely consider PR issues when bidding on competitor names, I don’t think ethics necessarily has to play into the equation, at least not for every company.

If I say something slanderous, that’s unethical and there are legal repercussions for that action, but why shouldn’t I bid on competitor names if it’s legal and I’m offering a relevant product or service in a tasteful way ?

For example lets use the ipod. Would seeing an ad that said “We sell MP3 players that compete with the ipod” really be unethical when a user was searching for “ipod”? Of course you’d want to consider legal ramifications before starting any campaigns like this as well as take into considerations pr, but I personally would have no problems with it, I think that from the user perspective it’s a good thing. Ipods will still sell and people looking for them specifically would still buy them, so what’s wrong with letting the market decide and laws decide what’s ok and what’s not? The title isn’t slanderous and can be verified to be true.

If a company does something stupid and hurtful, their business will probably fail, if I slander there are legal repercussions that action. Just bidding on a company keyword or name is not inherently unethical in my opinion. It all has to do with the circumstance and is relative to what you’re marketing.