Rescue Marketing? More Like Taking Advantage When Another Guy Is Down

Wow, am I angry. I am on the Board of Advisors for a terrific company called Critical Mentionone of the best media monitoring firms in the business. The fellow who runs it, Sean Morgan, has paid his dues, works like a madman and runs an honest firm providing an invaluable service to the PR industry. Well, last Sunday Hurricane Sandy knocked the heck out of their data center, along with those of other national firms whose equipment was housed in the same building in lower Manhattan. So to the rescue comes TVEyes, a direct competitor. And what does this competitor do? The company offersCritical Mention clients free 30day service because they are “here to help.” They go on to say how important media monitoring is and no one should go without. To me, any way you slice it, stealing another firm’s customers when they can’t respond is a shameful act.

For more details I refer you to “The Ethics of Rescue Marketing,” a blog written by Chris Penn, Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts.

So rather than offer to help a competitor who is down – through no fault of their own –TVEyes decides to take advantage of the situation in one of the most blatantly opportunistic acts I have ever seen, all in the name of “rescue marketing. Now I’ve heard a lot of fraudulent terminology in my day, but this is one of the worst examples ever.

So disappointing.