Break Sales Records with the 10 Absolute Laws of Small Business Marketing
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They are finding music through streaming and if they love it, they are going out and investing in it in a physical format. And because most vinyl is pressed in Europe , the price to manufacture has gone up this year. Higgins predicted the digital download would disappear entirely over the next few years as it became redundant. We now sell a ton of vinyl and the margins on vinyl are huge so it is really a significant source of revenue for us.
Code of Ethics and Business Conduct
The boost in vinyl sales is part of a wider shift in the fortunes of the music industry back towards turning a profit again. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. For example, television or radio advertisements are likely to have a wider reach than claims made by your sales staff. Puffery is a term used to describe wildly exaggerated, fanciful or vague claims about a good or service that no one could possibly treat seriously or find misleading. These statements are not considered misleading or deceptive under the ACL.
In addition to the prohibition against misleading or deceptive conduct, it is unlawful for a business to make false or misleading claims about goods or services. A misrepresentation is a claim or statement that is false or misleading made by one party to another. This includes claims or statements that you make in television or radio advertisements, in catalogues, on labels, on websites, in contracts or during contract negotiations , over the telephone, in correspondence such as letters or emails or in person.
You must not make false or misleading claims or statements, for example, that goods are of a particular standard, quality, value, grade, composition, style or model or have had a particular history or particular previous use. There are also specific rules against making false or misleading claims or statements about services and about the sale of land or employment.
Section 29 of the ACL sets out the types of claims or statements that may be false or misleading. The Federal Court found that a car manufacturer made false or misleading claims in advertisements for one of its vehicles. The manufacturer represented that the vehicle had seven seats as a standard feature when in fact five seats was the standard configuration.
Court declares motor vehicle advertising misleading. Bait advertising is the practice of offering items for sale at low prices to attract consumers to a business. Bait advertising can be a legitimate form of advertising. However, it is illegal to engage in this conduct where goods or services are advertised for sale at a discounted price, and they are not available in reasonable quantities and for a reasonable period at that price.
You must state clearly if the good is in short supply or on sale for a limited time. If there is not a reasonable chance the offer will be available at the advertised price, you may be in breach of the ACL unless you promptly offer a 'rain check', an acceptable substitute product or take other corrective action. The retailer usually sells about 30 televisions of this type every week. The retailer only stocks two televisions at the advertised price and refuses to take customer orders.
This is likely to be bait advertising as the retailer does not have a reasonable supply of the advertised television.
When supplying or promoting goods or services, it is unlawful to offer rebates, gifts, prizes or other free items without intending to provide them. It is also unlawful to fail to provide them as promised. A rebate or gift must be provided within the specified time or, if no time was specified, within a reasonable time.
If you use this promotional method, you should pay special attention to the detail of the offer to ensure your consumers are not misled. However, the business adds a fictitious name to the draw. The retailer publicises that the fictitious person won the draw.
The result is that the prize offered is not actually given to any of its customers. This practice is prohibited by law.
Corporate Governance
Cash back offers are a form of discounting. There are no problems with this marketing approach, but care should be taken in using it. Any conditions, limitations or restrictions should be made clear to the consumer before the purchase. After returning home and opening the packaging, a consumer finds that the offer is limited to one can per customer, and that in any event the offer expired a week earlier. The consumer has been misled and may not otherwise have made the purchase.
In this situation the packaging is misleading because the bold representation of the cash back offer was made without equally prominent mention of the limitations. As a result the consumer believed the offer applied to each product purchased. This kind of packaging prevents consumers from seeing the limitations on the offer. An electrical retailer is selling a television with a cash back offer. Businesses may use comparative advertising to directly promote the superiority of their products over another. The comparison may relate to factors such as price, quality, range or volume.
Comparative advertising is a direct challenge to competitors and before using comparative advertising, you should consider:. A battery manufacturer packages its batteries in a pack with a red sticker that claims the batteries will last longer than two other high-profile brands of batteries.
The claim is supported by independent tests but only against some of the other brand's batteries. The sticker does not identify that the claim does not apply to all of the other brands' batteries. While there is a more precise reference to the comparison on the back of the pack, the sticker on the front still makes the packaging misleading. You should consider the duration of advertisements planned and the likely reaction of competitors.
If a competitor is aware of a comparative campaign they may move quickly to change their product or service, and this could render your campaign misleading. Technology may be changing but the requirements of the ACL remain applicable. For example, all businesses involved in placing advertisements on search engines must take care not to mislead or deceive consumers. In the late s, the Google search engine displayed two types of search results: Organic search results were ranked in order of relevance to the search terms entered by the user.
A sponsored link was a form of advertisement, created by or at the direction of an advertiser, who typically paid Google each time a user clicked on the sponsored link. The Federal Court found that the classified ads business made false or misleading claims and engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct.
Court decision on Google clarifies misleading advertisements. It held that Google did not author the sponsored links; it merely published or displayed, without adoption or endorsement, misleading claims made by advertisers. Social media refers to any internet based application that facilitates the exchange of user-generated content. Social media gives both consumers and businesses a direct way to interact with each other.
A person can provide feedback, respond to articles, post images and generate other forms of content on websites. There are no specific or different consumer laws in place for social media. The laws which prohibit businesses from making false, misleading or deceptive claims about their products or services apply to social media in the same way they apply to any other marketing channel.
XYZ Pty Ltd tweets that they are the first Australian company to offer a per cent environmentally friendly car wash service when they have not done any research to support this. This tweet is likely to be false, misleading or deceptive. Businesses using social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have a responsibility to ensure content on their page is accurate, irrespective of who put it there. You can be held responsible for posts or public comments made by others on your social media pages which are false or likely to mislead or deceive consumers.
A policy provides contributors with expectations around when their posts may be moderated. In relation to Facebook for example, businesses and 'community managers' should refrain from removing all critical comments about the business posted on their Facebook page. As an open, two-way forum, there is an expectation that page moderators will only remove comments where necessary; for example offensive, unlawful or clearly untrue material.
To protect themselves, businesses that use social media should display their moderation policy prominently so that consumers have a clear understanding of when and why content will be moderated, whether that be through editing or by removing them. In , a court found that a company accepted responsibility for fan posts and testimonials on its social media pages when it knew about them and decided not to remove them.
Firm fined for testimonials by Facebook 'fans' and tweeters. LMN is unsure if this is true, but decides not to remove the post. LMN may be held responsible for this misleading claim. Monitor your social media pages and remove any posts that are false, misleading or deceptive as soon as you become aware of them.
The amount of time you need to spend monitoring your social media pages depends on two key factors: Keep in mind that social media operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and many consumers use social media outside normal business hours and on weekends. OPQ Pty Ltd has staff. As larger companies usually have sufficient resources and sophisticated systems, the ACCC would expect OPQ to become aware of false, misleading or deceptive posts on its Facebook page soon after they are posted and to act promptly to remove them.
You can respond to comments instead of removing them, but where the comment is false, it is possible that your response may not be sufficient to override the false impression made by the original comment. It may be safer to simply remove it. You should offer a refund to any customer who made the decision to purchase your product or service based on a false, misleading or deceptive claim they saw on your social media page.
Reviews and testimonials are popular tools used by businesses to promote their goods and services, particularly online, and can be a useful way for consumers to decide if a good or service is right for them. Regardless of the advertising medium, any review or testimonial should reflect the genuine views and opinions of the person that is represented to have made it. Businesses must not misrepresent consumer opinions to dishonestly promote themselves. A fake review or testimonial is one which does not reflect the genuinely held opinion of the author.
Using false or misleading reviews or testimonials in any advertising medium will risk contravening the ACL.
One solar panel company published written testimonials on its website and another published video testimonials on YouTube that were not made by genuine customers of the companies. Businesses should check reviews and testimonials carefully and implement good record keeping practices to ensure they are able to show that reviews and testimonials are honest and accurate.
Online reviews are increasingly being relied upon by consumers as a low cost means of making more informed purchasing decisions. Online reviews can cover both online businesses and traditional bricks and mortar businesses. Review platforms generally publish reviews on their own site. Just as for other advertising mediums, fake online reviews are in breach of the ACL. Businesses or review platforms must not post or publish misleading reviews.
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It should also be remembered that omitting negative reviews can be just as misleading as posting fake reviews. Businesses seeking to avoid the risk of misleading consumers should also not engage a review platform to selectively remove or edit negative reviews. A removalist created a review website, www. The removalist also wrote fake testimonials posed as genuine consumer testimonials on third party review websites. Removalist admits publishing false testimonials. Managing online reviews Related publication: Online reviews — a guide for business and review platforms.
Businesses sometimes qualify claims or include exclusionary clauses in their advertisements. When using these clauses, businesses should ensure that the limitations they place are legal. Whether or not something misleads an audience depends on the overall impression created.
The exclusions should be considered together with the main offer and what is contained in the headline. The customer is not required to exhaustively search for qualifications and exclusions. A national department store runs a series of advertisements in newspapers and on television about a sale. The television advertisements prominently state that discounts will apply to all clothing.
Another series of television advertisements states that discounts will apply to all homewares. In fine print both ads exclude certain brands of clothing and homewares. Related newspaper advertisements do not make any reference to the exclusion of certain brands. A failure to clearly specify the exclusions is likely to mislead customers and therefore breach the ACL. Fine print is often used in advertisements, contracts, labelling and signs. These qualifications usually appear close to the lead selling point. This may not protect that business from breaching the ACL. The main selling point used for a product or service may make such a strong impression that no disclaimer can dispel it.
An advertiser must not make the real terms and conditions of the offer unclear or unreadable by:. The type and context of the advertisement is relevant as well. For example, it will be harder to ensure that small print conveys the real terms of the offer on a billboard on a highway that cars pass at kilometres per hour, as compared to small print in a newspaper advertisement. A gardening service offers a special lawn mowing deal — after four paid services, the fifth lawn mowing is half-price. The offer is made through a series of radio advertising segments.
The terms and conditions are in fact quite onerous, requiring the customer to live in a two kilometre radius of the business, be a pensioner and it applies only to lawn mowing on Monday mornings. The failure to clarify or explain important elements of the offer is likely to mislead customers and therefore breach the ACL.
A business that makes a claim about future matters including predictions or projections must have reasonable grounds for doing so at the time of making the claims.
If it does not then the business can be guilty of misleading or deceptive conduct. It is the responsibility of the business that made the claim to show that it had reasonable grounds to make the statement. It is important that you consider, or adequately address, the range of uncertainties and variables involved when making claims about the future.
A real estate agent claims that a golf course will be developed in the area within the next year as a major selling point to the properties sold. The agent continues to make these claims despite knowing there are no plans to develop a golf course. The agent is misleading potential purchasers by suggesting there are such plans when the agent has no reasonable grounds to do so. Under the ACL it is illegal to request payment for goods or services that the consumer has not agreed to buy. In a dispute, if you are demanding payment, you must prove your legitimate right.
Some businesses may try to place consumers or other businesses in a position where they will either:. While washing her hair the hairdresser gives her a conditioning treatment that she did not ask for. Receiving things you didn't ask for Legislation: Australian Consumer Law Part Division 2. It is common for a business to seek to persuade a consumer to buy goods or services by promising benefits if they help the business supply goods or services to other consumers. The ACL makes such a practice illegal if receipt of the benefit for example, a rebate or commission is dependent on the other consumers also acquiring goods or services.
The consumer may never receive the benefit in these circumstances, which is why the practice is illegal. A sales assistant offers a customer 10 free DVDs to go with their new plasma TV on the condition that they give the business the names of five of their friends and that these friends all buy plasma TVs from the business. This type of offer is illegal. It is not referral selling for a supplier to promise a benefit for simply providing the names of consumers. This is likely to be a breach of the ACL. If you do accept payment in advance, you must supply the goods or services within the time you have specified, or within a reasonable time, if no time is specified.
Unfair business practices Legislation: An agreement is considered to be a lay-by agreement if it is between a supplier and a consumer, where:. Agreements must also be expressed in plain language, be legible and presented clearly. A consumer can cancel a lay-by agreement but may have to pay a reasonable termination charge.
This termination charge must be specified in the agreement. A customer orders a Christmas hamper in advance and agrees to make regular monthly instalments. This is a lay-by agreement and the supplier must ensure they have met all the lay-by requirements, including providing an agreement in writing to the customer specifying all the terms and conditions and any termination charges that may apply.
Australian Consumer Law Part Division 3. Common complaints about these channels include non-supply and incomplete supply of services, and difficulty in booking services and redeeming vouchers before they expire. A group buying platform sells vouchers for customers to get two bunches of flowers for the price of one at a florist.
The site specifies a time limit for redeeming the vouchers but does not indicate any limit on how many vouchers the florist will honour. The florist cannot keep up with a late rush of demand in the last days of the validity period and refuses to honour a number of vouchers. The group buying platform, which has the contract with the consumer, in addition to the merchant, is responsible for providing a remedy under the Act which, amongst other remedies, may include a refund.
Advertisements for health and medical services, and the benefits they provide, can have a powerful influence on consumers. It is essential that businesses selling health and medical products and services provide consumers with accurate and truthful information so they can make informed decisions. A business manufactured and sold wristbands that it claimed improved balance, strength and flexibility. After the ACCC expressed concern about the claims, the manufacturer admitted there was no scientific evidence and therefore no reasonable grounds for making the representations.
Break Sales Records with the 10 Absolute Laws of Small Business Marketing - Kindle edition by Warren Rosaluk. Download it once and read it on your Kindle. This brief guide is based on the author's 20 years as a marketing consultant and experience with over 1, clients who, with an % success rate, report.
The business offered refunds to consumers and provided a court enforceable undertaking to the ACCC that it would publish corrective advertising, remove misleading representations from its website and not make claims about its products that are not supported by independent testing. Power Balance admits no reasonable basis for wristband claims, consumers offered refunds. The company could not do this. The Federal Court found that the company had engaged in false, misleading or deceptive conduct and that its director was knowingly concerned in or a party to the contraventions. Allergy treatment declared misleading.
Businesses often make claims about their products in an attempt to obtain a selling advantage. These claims go beyond generic descriptions of products.
This is not allowed under the ACL. XYZ Pty Ltd tweets that they are the first Australian company to offer a per cent environmentally friendly car wash service when they have not done any research to support this. Notwithstanding this decision, every case will be different and it would be open to the Court to find in another case, depending on the particular factors, a different period. The decision whether to shut down or operate is not affected by exit barriers. Businesses must not engage in RPM and it is prohibited outright by law. It can occur between businesses and consumers or business to business.
The Act is complemented by Standard 1. Olive oil producer pays infringement notices for extra virgin claims. Olive oil Related publication: The good oil - a guide to buying olive oil. As consumers are often unable to assess the accuracy of premium claims, you must ensure that the claims you make can be substantiated. Free range claims are used to market animal products, such as eggs and meat, that have been farmed in an open range outdoor environment.
Businesses should be careful about what impression may be conveyed by any pictorial representations they use. The ACCC took action against a duck meat producer in relation to false and misleading statements that its duck meat products were open range when the ducks were raised solely in indoor sheds. The producer was found to have made misrepresentations on its packaging, website, delivery trucks, signage and merchandise through written and pictorial representations. The ACCC argued that these descriptions represented that the ducks, amongst other things, spend a substantial amount of time outdoors when this was not the case.
Some businesses claim their product has not been tested on animals. But who would new rules satisfy and serve? It also results in a winnowing of sound. There may be 16 Ed Sheeran songs in the Top 40, but there are at least half a dozen more forged in his image. With the news that Sheeran is auditioning talents for his very own boyband , who will sing his songs and support him on tour, the Sheeran Singularity only beckons.
Topics Ed Sheeran Music blog. UK charts Pop and rock Music industry blogposts. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? Ed Sheeran apologises after bot banishes busker fan from Facebook.