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Advertising brand names that we sell online

I can sell more by advertising using the brand name

         

miammiam

3:23 pm on Sep 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi

Can anyone give me some advice? We are currently sell a variety of products and brands in a market sector and use these brand names in our advertising. One of these brand names whose products we retail both in our shop and online has emailed us asking us to stop using this brand name on our website. Many of our competitors use their brand name online so currently is not unusual - what is, is that we've been no 1 & 2 on google for the brand for the past 6 months.

There's nothing in our agreement about using or not using brand names online at the moment. Obviously we'd want to discuss this with them in a constructive way with a view to an outcome that enables us to sell their products online, as we do in the shop, however has anyone got any advice as to what our approach/strategy should be to persuade them that if we sell more products, we end up buying more from them as they are the wholesaler of the branded product?

miam

jomaxx

4:33 pm on Sep 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Quite frankly, if you sell their product then it's hard to see how you could not use their brand name on your website. This seems a little thin-skinned to me.

This is quite common with respect to bidding on the brand name in PPC search engines, but I can't recall a case where a retailer was ever prohibited from mentioning a brand name on its own site.

jomaxx

4:39 pm on Sep 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



P.S. But if they control the distribution chain and can stop you from selling their product at all, then unfortunately you may have no choice but to work out some kind of compromise.

Macro

5:45 pm on Sep 29, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



miammiam, they can indeed stop you from advertising their trademark.

We had the same issue with a big manufacturer of LCD screens. They did try exactly walking over us because we came up #1 in Google for most of their products. So we dumped them. We kept our #1 ranking page, gave the manufacturer all the appropriate trademark acknowledgements and then used that page to say that we weren't selling those S****** products anymore and are now recommending brand Y.

Depends on how dispensible you see them to be.