The speech’s central theme sprung from my belief that the industry needs for more and more of its companies and brands to move towards better consumer practices, and how as an industry we need to distinguish ourselves from the poor business practices consumers have been exposed to over the years. Moving away from a ‘slash and burn mentality’ is a crucial step toward creating a sustainable adult market going forward. The bad practices I’m referring to are things like spamming, pop ups, hidden charges, bad customer service, false advertising, and distribution (intentional and otherwise) of viruses, Trojans and other forms of malware.
As I conceded in my keynote, Pink Visual been a ‘perfect company’ throughout our history, and we made definitely some mistakes along the way – but we have improved the consumer experience for our customers in many ways, and we always steered clear of the worst of those bad practices, to begin with. I also believe that the more companies who work to improve the consumer experience and the more that stay away from supporting companies who do treat the consumer poorly, the faster consumer confidence and the general public’s perception of our industry will improve, as well.
On that note, I’d like to share some simple tools for anyone who shares my line of thinking:
Consumer complaint sites to review where you send your traffic or who you might do business with:
http://www.complaintsboard.com/
An in-depth review of who you may link off to or what consumers may think of your sites http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/
Information on FTC guidelines for advertisers and affiliates:
http://www.squidoo.com/FTC-new-rules
(I think this is an indication of how the FTC is focusing not only on how companies promote their products, but how their advertisers and affiliates promote them, too.)
That’s it for now. Again, I know we’re not all perfect, but I do know a lot of people share my desire for the industry to improve the way it is perceived by consumers, regulators, legislators and the general public, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on how we can achieve that goal.
