Find Your Biggest Fans…And Sue Them!
Monday, January 14th, 2008
Wow. I thought only record companies had the gall to alienate their best customers with legalistic bullying. I was wrong.
Ford is now claiming ownership (in the sense of intellectual property) of all images of Ford vehicles, including photographs that Ford car owners take of their own cars. When a group of product enthusiasts called the Black Mustang Club tried to publish a calendar of their own cars on CafePress, Ford cease-and-desisted their behinds by releasing the legal hounds on CafePress.
Makes me want to use my best Bugs Bunny voice (all respects and posthumous royalties due to Mel Blanc): What a maroon.
This is not a rant against intellectual property rights. It’s a rant against bad marketing by companies grown-up enough to know better.
For the sake of “protecting” your brand, Ford, you have just alienated a group of people (at least twelve of them) who were likely to buy and actively promote your products for the rest of their lives.
In taking this action you’ve spread a little anti-marketing among many more people than every would have even heard of the BMC 2008 calendar otherwise.
Good show, Ford.
If you really need to pad the to-do list of your legal department so it appears they do something other than dig for loopholes in labor and pension laws, don’t you think your time could be better spent on a less desirable ideavirus?
Come to think of it, that white decal would stand out pretty well on a black Mustang.
Your turn: How does your company (past, present, or future) treat its biggest fans? On the flip side, what kind of treatment have you gotten by being a fan?
