After a competing vendor once blatantly stole a bunch of his company’s positioning / messaging language … a CEO I knew shipped them a box of t-shirts (with his company’s logo on it), noting “you stole our message, you might as well wear our t-shirt while you’re at it.” The offending vendor’s response was to hand out the t-shirts to homeless people at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, and to pay them to loiter around their rival’s booth for the entire event. A real testament to how far beyond the boundaries of taste people will go in the good name of competition.
On a related note, Strumpette ran a very interesting article yesterday about some next-generation types of devious PR sabotage that’s going to be enabled (by the same Web 2.0 technologies that are being lauded for their communicative powers).
“There are thousands of ways to screw with the basic relationship between the organization and its stakeholders frankly. But now with Web 2.0, it doesn’t get any easier.”
The article runs through a number of “Web 2.0″ technologies, highlighting corresponding ways that devious competitors might turn them around to wreak havok.
