Got this one from Esendex chap, Julian Hucker. Esendex are a mobile services company. Incentivated is a mobile marketing services company. They’re not immediate competitors. Which is why Julian was rather susprised to find that Incentivated have been reportedly using his company name as a keyword in Google.
Link: Julian Hucker
A quick search revealed that the offending party was Incentivated – in fact they were outbidding us so must really have felt that Esendex was a hot search term!
As per my earlier post, I put in my normal telephone call but was suprised by the result. Unfortunately Jonathon, I believe he is the MD, didn’t want to take my call.
However he left it to one of his colleagues to tell me that he didn’t think “it was much of a problem”.
Unusual behaviour — however I’m in two minds. Part of my uber-capitalist perspective thinks this is all-fair-in-love-and-war — is it actually ‘passing off’? Strictly speaking, I’m not so sure — if you type ‘Esendex’ and you see an advertisement for ‘Incentivated’, so be it. Chances are that users searching for Esendex wouldn’t click on an Incentivated link. Different if you’re searching for ‘text services’ or ‘shortcodes’.
Anyway, unusual.
Well – it’s not just Esendex – they have Sponge, Mindmatics, Enpocket – you name ’em they’ve paid for them. Perhaps we should all just click like crazy on their links until the money is spent!!
Douglas
Douglas, what a shocking suggestion 😉
Ewan, we probably disagree whether this is “passing off” but you’ve previously written pretty vehemently about lazy pr and this, to me, is lazy marketing. Inevitably these things turn out to be something of storm in a teacup, but someone, somewhere does it about every 4-6 weeks: there’s a company in Ecquador who’ve ripped off our entire site!
We’d probably see ourselves as building a reputation rather than a brand at the moment. If someone types “Esendex” into Google it’s a fair bet that they are looking for us (they could of course be a propsect, customer, competitor,or supplier). The only reason for a third party to bid on Esendex is to try and snaffle some of this interest in our reputation.
Going forward we’re simply considering have a page on our website listing all current trademark disputes and their current status. As you say,”all[‘s]-fair-in-love-and-war”