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Are you prepared to lose control of your brand? Well that’s the question I put to the Association of Advertisers in Ireland last week at a workshop that I facilitated.
We had a great debate and there were some great case studies in the room of businesses using social media and achieving a real return on investment, from Cadbury to Coke.
One story caught my attention this week was the face that interactive marketing agency POKE had developed a project which was an online tool that people could use to ‘customise’ the Snickers logo – the project launched on 3 March 2009 and was live just 8 days.
MediaBistro.com report that:
Snickers and their parent company, Mars, have sent a cease and desist. On one hand you get it, right? Snickers didn’t authorize POKE to do anything with/for their brand at all. In fact, the brand recently dropped way too much on a complicated website of their own.
Here is a screen shot of the site Snckrz.com
What would you do as the owner of the brand?
On the one hand you want would love to encourage word of mouth marketing and have loyal fans of your brand sharing information about your products.
However you never briefed the agency who developed this.
And if you don’t take a stand in terms of copyright infringement where do you draw the line?
Should you engage with the agency and come to an agreement where you give them credit, potentially reward them financially and then develop the idea yourselves?
I definitely recommend that you make sure that your Trademark Licensing team has made sure that you own the domain names for alter ego’s of your brand?
What would you advise? Did Snickers take the appropriate action in your opinion?
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March 17th, 2009 at 6:42 am
RT @krishnade When Or Should You Be Prepared To Lose Control Of Your Brand? http://tinyurl.com/d8yo7l
March 17th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Social media is about sharing, engaging and…not being in control. For many companies that have not yet thought or analysed the possibility of plunging into social media, this would sound scary but these are the rules so far.
I believe that as long as there’s good will from any company or individual, they can always play, engage and interact with your brand in whatever way. If the buzz if good, at the end of the day, your company is on the spotlight based on the efforts of a 3rd one. Isn’t that fantastic? They were thinking about you!!
Obviously, it could happen as well, that it gets out of hands and the message generated is not the one you’d have loved for your company…but, can you really stop that?
Before you engage, make sure that you register your business name/s, domains, etc, etc. After that, share and enjoy. There are certainly more great experiences from social media than bad ones. It’s worth the journey
March 17th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Reading: http://twitthis.com/7sgwm2
March 26th, 2009 at 2:04 am
When Or Should You Be Prepared To Lose Control Of Your Brand? http://tinyurl.com/d8yo7l