Free As In... Oh, Wait, Not Free

from the misleading-advertising dept

It was just a couple weeks ago that we were wondering why companies bothered with big promotions that were obviously misleading. When the fine print shows that what you're promising in the headline is bogus, the promotion is going to backfire. All it's going to do is piss off the people you suckered into believing the promotion. That doesn't seem like the most productive way to get long term business out of customers. However, companies keep doing it. The latest is that all of the various mobile phone operators in the US have been accused of bogus promotions (some of them have already settled, others are likely to be settling soon). The complaints all arise from promotions that promised something for FREE, but the fine print showed was anything but free. Obviously, there's value in promoting free stuff -- but what good does it do when you're not actually giving out that free stuff? Angering customers isn't a long term strategy. And mobile operators wonder why they have so much churn in their subscriber ranks.