Got cha
What I think is important here is to understand that the ACCC and ASIC were after Henry for quite some time.
But both authorities needed to find something that they could actually prosecute, and this breech is something they could.
ALL claims in marketing need to be able to be proven.
But the fact is that many companies are prosecuted for breeches in the Trade Practices Act.
For example one of my favourite companies, Flight Centre was recently forced to stop using their long term catch phrase “Lowest Airfares Guaranteed” because it was deemed “false and misleading”. They didn’t actually guarantee they had the lowest airfares, they just promised that if you found one cheaper elsewhere they would match it. It’s a technical point and Flight Centre could easily have got upset and tried to fight it, but they just said, “fair cop” and got on with it so the news story was buried on page 93 and left to die.
However the ACCC’s prosecution of HK was the final nail in his coffin – whereas with a company like Flight Centre with an enviable reputation for service and meeting it’s service delivery promise virtually nobody noticed and it certainly has had no impact on it’s business or turnover.
So it all comes back to intent, integrity and reputation. My guess is that if HK was delivering in all other areas of his business this would not have been much of a big deal, but because he wasn’t, and because many people by that time viewed him as dishonest and so on, it hurt him badly.
One of my favourite ads, on a bill board 100m from the Porsche dealership said, “Nobody ever gets out of a Masserati wanting to drive a Porsche!” I thought it was funny and cleaver but according to the Trade Practices act would have, in my opinion, been deemed false and misleading. For it to be true Masserati would have had to poll EVERY person who had EVER driven a Masserati and would have needed a 100% success rate at ensuring that nobody at that moment had ever wanted to drive a Porsche. And I am sure people wearing funny wigs could have argued for weeks on what constituted “nobody”, “ever”, and “wanting”.
I think the important thing is to always conduct ourselves with as much integrity that we can muster, go about our business with a genuine ideal of “doing it right” and if from time to time we make a mistake, or (like Masserati) were just trying to be clever and get tripped up, people, our clients, will forgive us.
