Chevrolet Using Maruti Brand to Promote Beat

At Unyscape we were waiting for long for an interesting topic to launch our blog . We finally found one.

Scary for both Chevrolet & Maruti

Google Adwords is very powerful marketing tool – but with great power comes great responsibility. Chevrolet is using Adwords extensively to promote its various car brands. We at Unyscape were analyzing use of adwords by auto industry. We went to google.co.in and searched for “cars”. The ad by Chevrolet shocked us.  The first line of Ad copy says ” Maruti Small Cars – Looking for Small Cars? | chevrolet.co.in”. (We discovered some more key words on which Chevrolet is plagiarizing Maruti’s brand name).

In our opinion it is a brand name infringement issue. But who is at fault? The good blokes of marketing at Chevrolet? We don’t think so. After all day today execution of marketing campaign is responsibility of the ad agency. Even though the buck will stop at Chevrolet, their fault is that of oversight – their marketing department approved the ad copies without vetting.

What about the ad agency? Their digital marketing team must definitely know that they can’t use Maruti’s brand name in ad copy of competition. They would never dream of pulling a stunt like this in electronic, print, or outdoor media. So this brings us to the question – Can ad agencies and brands abuse Internet? In this case a brand with smaller market share (Chevrolet) is using name of a brand with about 50% market share to catch eyeballs, increase click through rate, and sell some cars!!!

We think Chevrolet should ask their ad agency to put an end to practices like these and put checks and balances to avoid repeat in future.