There’s an interesting little storm brewing over here in the UK.
There’s a fairly well known business guru here called Chris Cardell. He does seminars for small business owners and has online membership clubs etc.. I can’t comment on the quality of his work as I’ve never bought any of his stuff – however you can get a general idea of feedback by googling his name.
Earlier this year Cardell ran a direct mail campaign where the piece being mailed was made to look like a newspaper clipping with an article singing his praises with a post-it note attached in handwritten script saying “Ian, I saw this and thought of you. This guy is brilliant. Have a look at his website” and is signed “J”. The Advertising Standards Authority in the UK ruled the ad to be misleading and the claims in it unsubstantiated and told him not to repeat it. You can read the ruling here.
He also came in for criticism that the “free gifts” he advertisised in the piece came with an expensive monthly subscription plan attached that many people found it difficult to unsubscribe from.
Recently he ran the piece again in slightly modified form (I got one myself and it fooled me for a minute or so).
I guess what he hadn’t counted on was the uproar this approach would create in the social media world. Dozens and dozens of bloggers wrote posts on it. Some credited it with being clever – but most decried it as being deceptive and unethical.
The end impact was that if you google his name you get an awful lot of negative vibes. So much so that the first additional word suggested by google when you type in “Chris Cardell” is the word “scam”. That can’t be good for business.
Update: He’s tried to counter (or maybe even take advantage of) the scam association by running an adwords campaign targeting “Chris Cardell Scam”. he appears at the top of the paid listings, and directs people to a page where he calls traditional advertising a scam. So maybe he’s hoping people will think that “Chris Cardell Scam” really means his views on advertising being a scam – rather than the original meaning of people thinking his direct mail was a scam.
So what’s Cardell’s answer been? Has it been to go back and review his campaign and whether he should be running it? Has he realised that in todays social media dominated world you just can’t get away with some of the things you used to get away with?
No.
He’s hired a bunch of lawyers to send threatening Cease and Desist letters to bloggers to get them to take down their blog posts.
I’m not sure if they’ve sent similar letters to google to get them to remove the blog posts from their cache, or the Internet Archive to wipe them from the Wayback Machine!
Will his bully-boy tactics work?
Personally I think not. It’s one of the great things to have come out of social media that you just can’t get away with things or bury them under the carpet any more.
In even the recent past you could succeed with brilliant marketing and a mediocre product because it was relatively difficult for buyers (especially via mail order) to get any real feedback on what your product was really like. Nowadays you can. The truth is out there, and thanks to google it’s a doddle to find it on blogs or via social media channels.
Now it may well be that I end up getting a Cease and Desist notice for this innoccuous blog post. But rather like the little Ants in Pixar’s Bugs Life standing up to the big mean old grasshoppers – every time one of us gets knocked down, another will stand up to take their place, then another, then another. I believe that even big bad grasshoppery gurus and law firms can’t take on so many of us blogger ants forever.
In fact, a number of posts just like mine have started appearing reporting on his attempts to legally gag bloggers. Here’s one from popular IT commentary blog The Register.
I’ll keep you updated if I get the big bad old letter…
What’s your view? Is Cardell doing the right thing? Will it work – can he silence criticism from so many bloggers? Will it backfire? Drop you comments in the box below – I’d love to hear them.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
It does undermine his statement that he’s the “recognised as Britain’s leading expert on … Advanced Thinking. ”
If bloggers are not in the UK how enforceable are the “cease and desist” letters?
Hehe. Indeed.
I think most of the bloggers are UK based – certainly the ones who originally recieved his direct mail.
However, he’s chosen to use a US law firm for his Cease and Desist notice. And apparently he’s trademarked his name in the US or some other such madness.
Ian
Hi Ian
Thanks for a great blog post – very interesting. I too am on the Chris Cardell database and have to smile at the persistence of the man if nothing else!
I haven’t met anybody who has been on any of his “Entrepreneur Summits” but he certainly seems to have a lot of fans.
I guess it’s a case of watch this space!
Nicky
There is no doubt that Chris Cardell is an excellent marketeer. I have been on his mailing list for a couple of years now and to give the man his due, he gives a lot of useful stuff away for free.
He certainly seems to be highly respected by many and has developed a guru status, albeit a self-styled one as you might expect from a top marketing man. Unfortunately of late, he has (in my opinion) become guilty of over indulgent self recommendation and too much exposure. I’m getting far to much email from the man every week. Still, I’m not ready to opt-out because his free stuff can be very useful and quite inspiring for the average struggling entrepreneur.
Frankly, Cardell was better before he started his ‘bums on seats’ campaign and he continues to punt his ‘summit’ as the best event on the business calendar. I haven’t bitten that bait yet and I’m unlikely to do so.
To be perfectly honest though, I quite liked his direct mail campaign. It was very clever and as it was directed at business owners and not Joe Bloggs (the consumer), I cannot see what harm it did. You would have to be a bit dumb to send him money in advance of seeing what he offers, which as I’ve already said is F.O.C. in many cases.
As far as criticism on blog sites is concerned, as long as the comments are truthful, reasonable and well moderated by the owner, then all is fair in love an war (so to speak). However, I do sympathise with people who get lynch mobbed by bloggers and social media, because this can easily become the new ‘rent-a-crowd’ method of defamation by those with a devious motive.
And finally, let’s not forget the famous adage “No publicity is bad publicity”, so Chris is probably having the last laugh at all this.
Hi Mark,
I’m not quite sure how harmless it is. I genuinely believe a number of people think the post it and clipping are for real and sign up because of it. After all, it’s a “free: offer.
In some ways you could say it’s targeting the gullible – because it’s not really a free offer. When you come to sign up you give over your credit card for “postage and packing” and it also signs you up for a months free membership of his website, but then charges you £40 in perpetuity afterwards unless you remember to cancel.
From reports on the web, a number of people have said they’ve had great difficulty cancelling (although, to be fair, others have said they’ve had no problems at all).
In the US, the payment processors are clamping down on this sort of “P&P only” offer to get the credit card details then signing people up for a forced continuity offer. They’ve suspended some people’s merchant accounts as a result as they believe it’s a misleading practice.
Ian
That’s fair comment Ian. It’s not the alleged deception I admire, it was the cheeky (and highly effective) approach by snail mail that caught my attention. There can be no doubt it worked and in this economic climate, we need unconventional and outrageous ideas that work. We can all learn from them.
Despite the move towards email and online selling, I believe there is still a vital place in the marketing process for direct mail by post. The more it calls a reader to action and the more it encourages them to go to their computers and join your email marketing list, the better. However, I do agree with you that it must always be ethical and sincere.
Had Cardell’s offer been genuinely ‘free’ then he would have won more admiration and yet still reaped a substantial email list in the process. From this he could have steadily educated people about his services and won their praises instead of their anger, thus leading to legitimate sales and not forced ones.
Nothing is more annoying than finding a charge on your credit card statement that you never expected, particularly if it was collected under false pretences.
However, does Chris Cardell’s sign up process hide the ongoing charges? I doubt it! We all like something for nothing and it’s no good complaining if we don’t read the offer properly. It’s not really a scam if it spells out what the deal is. The issue is insinuating that the offer is free when in fact people have to reach for their credit card and pay £1 or whatever it may be. So ‘scam’ isn’t really a fair word to use because that would imply a deliberate attempt to defraud people.
Nonetheless, I don’t particularly like the P&P practice either because, just like the ‘one year interest free’ trick we get offered in stores when buying stuff for home, we all tend to forget the payment point and that is exactly what the finance companies rely on in order to force a credit agreement on us. My guess is that Mr Cardell applies the same logic and collects a large number of £40 windfalls before an equal number of annoyed people cancel. Most of them will be annoyed with themselves of course, which no doubt limits the criticism somewhat. Hey Chris, it could be worse! You could have Trading Standards on your doorstep and not just the ASA.
But let’s get real here. Salesmanship (sorry, salespersonship) surely has to survive and prosper, otherwise we will eventually become a sterile nanny state, devoid of marketing entrepreneurs with sales flair and full of wrist slapping, bureaucratic, sales prevention officers. It’s bad enough already! At the end of the day, people aren’t stupid but we all buy things on a whim and regret it afterwards. As you have highlighted Ian, the fundamental problem is the ability to instantly buy online with such consummate ease. Is that something we really want to stop though?
Hats off to creative marketing I say, but with a few words of advice to Cardell. You can fool some of the people some of the time…etc. But I’m sure he doesn’t need me to rub salt in the wound. I’m quite sure he will bounce back from this and learn from the experience.
Hi Mark,
He doesn’t hide the ongoing charges (they appear in a line when you’re about to hit the guy button). But he doesn’t exactly make them very clear. The best practices they’re adopting in the US in the moment ask for very clear opt-in check boxes for continuity.
I had planned to do a post/video comparing his mailing with one I thought was much better from Moneyweek.
The Moneyweek one was an enclosure with “The Week” magazine which I subscribe to. It initially looks like a “supplement” magazine. In fact it looks exactly like a copy of Moneyweek from the front cover – it has the usual sort of cartoon picture and says “Read this or lose £43,000″ in magazine style as a headline. So it “fools” you a bit in that you could take it to be an extra magazine.
But when you read it for 2 minutes you can tell it’s not. It’s about 12 pages long – the first 8 of which are a pure content report on property investment and other things like that. The remaining 3 are an advert for its free giveaway investment report when you subscribe to the magazine with a few issues thrown in free. The final page is a subscription form with all the charges made very clear.
The big difference is that the Cardell piece does it’s level best to pretend to be an unbiased newpaper clipping. It tries to “prove” the investment in Cardell’s stuff will be good by giving testimonials in the piece, sales hype purporting to be journalism about how wonderful he is, and the fake recommendation from a friend.
The Moneyweek piece attempts to “prove” the investment in their magazine by giving a ton of valuable free info in the mini report. You can judge whether you’ll get value from the magazine by the value you get from the report. It doesn’t pretend to be a valuable report. It is one. So much so that when I came to do the recycling, I removed it from the pile just in case I wanted to re-read it at some point. That’s a coup for a piece of direct advertising – not only did I not bin it, I deliberately saved it to re-read later. And I’m not even an investor.
To me, that’s good direct mail. Creative, not deceptive. And adding value in the piece itself.
Ian
I received a gagging order a few weeks ago from a US lawyer, I can’t disclose whether the lawyer was representing the same person.
With me in some ways they actually had a case, as fair dealing isn’t the same as fair use.
You have a nice photo in your sidebar – If I used that picture in a fairly level review of everything I could find about you online, with some useful fair review/criticism, you possibly wouldn’t send me a cease & desist.
The best solution is to address the criticism, even to make it something to learn from as I have nothing against pushing the envelope a little (direct marketing pun)
However that didn’t stop me mentioning quite strongly how utterly stupid their methodology to gag bloggers seems to be.
p.s. are you running something to prevent proxy hijacking? You have nofollow on every link.
Hi Andy – great to get a comment from you – love your blog over at http://andybeard.eu although it does get a little too deep in techie SEO stuff for my brain to handle.
I’m interested that a US law firm (with little apparent knowledge of online reputation management) targeted a Polish based blogger on behalf of a UK “guru”. Jeux sans frontiers?
Ian
It’s fascinating the response to Chris’s Direct Mail and his offer. What know one seems to point out is that his ‘teaching’s’ are just his business model. Many of his ‘strategies’ and ‘top tips’ are pretty standard marketing best practice. What he ‘is’ doing is delivering it in a get off you backside and do it self help style. Which I think is fair enough, although in the UK quite new and is becoming more popular but in the US its the old Tim Robbins Gig… If you go to one of his seminars expect to be sold to big time but in a soft UK middle class way…
Jake,
I suspect the reason no one points anything out in this case is that it’s irrelevant to the case in point. Whether he’s got a “get off your backside” style or not doesn’t excuse deceptive marketing, nor does it excuse trying to gag legitimate comment because somehow it “infringes on his copyright”.
Ian
PS I think you mean Tony Robbins. Tim Robbins is the actor from the Shawshank Redemption and other films
Ian
Thanks for the correction…
mmm. My point is that he talks the talk and walks the walk. Is it deceptive to personalise a piece of marketing. He’s not targeting little old ladies after all… His mailing shows the power of Direct Mail and how personalisation can perform very well when done properly.
Don’t get me wrong I not some huge fan just interested in how the story is panning out.
Is it deceptive to personalise a piece of marketing? Certainly not.
Personalisation is the using of the recipients name in this case. There are other, more advanced ways of personalising too.
But the furore is not about personalisation. It’s about using a post-it note that purports to come from someone called “J” who says Cardell is great. That’s not personalised – it’s the same J for everyone.
And it’s about faking up the tear sheet to look like it’s a news story about him from the Times/Telegraph when in reality it’s just an ad. That’s not personalised either.
Now we could argue all day whether it’s “clever” (i.e. it’s tongue-in-cheek and all the people who receive it realise it’s not real) or whether it’s deceptive (i.e. it’s designed to fool at least a few people into believeing the article is genuine reportage about how great Cardell is.
I personally belive it’s deceptive. So does the Advertising Standards Authority who’ve told him not to do it again (although timelines suggest he’s ignored them).
Ian