Is Imitation Fair Play?

At Berkeley Myles Solutions we embrace healthy competition as it drives us to provide a better product and service for our customers.

However we believe in the traditional British values of playing fair and that competing should be a professional and transparent process.

Recently we have been victim of a number of companies that haven’t played by the “rules” and have tried to imitate us by piggybacking on our trade mark.

This is not the case of one culprit but THREE – Emax Systems, ValueChain.com and Statii.

When someone stumbles upon a good thing there are always larger numbers of people who rush in to grab a piece of it so they can have a good thing too.

Copying is human nature. It’s so much easier than spending time, money, sweat, blood, and tears on creating your own great brand.

In our case, as you would expect, initially we were a bit annoyed however as we thought more about it, that old phrase came to mind – “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”.

Why use something like Emax Systems, Valuechain.com or Statii when you can have ProgressPlus?

As you can see from the screenshots, we had three companies imitating us. These companies cannot copy the quality of ProgressPlus software and support so they try and trick you into thinking they are ProgressPlus by stealing our trade mark.

It makes you think, we must be doing something right if all these companies want to be recognised as ProgressPlus?

Emax Systems

Emax Systems have been sneaky by writing an article that gets found on Bing organic search results – ‘Progress PLUS ERP Efficiency’. By using our brand name in the title of their article they have tricked Bing into ranking the article.

However, anyone searching Progress Plus in Bing will recognise they just want to be us.

Statii

Statii used Google AdWords to advertise for our brand and variations of it such as Progress Plus, Progress Plus ERP and Progress Plus MRP. As you can see from the advert they used our brand name to promote their business. Statii knew it was wrong, but they did it anyway.

Valuechain.com

Valuechain.com took it to another level with their brashness. Their advert is blatant misrepresentation by promoting themselves as us (at least Statii spent time writing an advert to pretend they weren’t trying to be us). Valuechain.com did it without regard for things like trade mark infringement and they flagrantly flouted the law.

To anyone searching for Progress Plus it looks like Valuechain.com would rather be us instead of themselves.

What to do if a competitor steals your trade mark online?

As this situation is a breach of trade mark we contacted the search engines direct. If you have competitors trying to imitate you, you might want to follow the steps we took:

1. You may be unaware of this already happening. Type your branded keywords and variations of it into search engines and make sure you check the adverts at the top of the page.
2. What is a trade mark and what is not? Even if you haven’t registered your trade mark, if you have been using your company name or product brand for a while it would be deemed an unregistered trade mark. A trader mispresenting goods or services is committing an offence known as “passing off”.
3. We contacted the search engines with evidence of the trade mark infringement. Use this tool to contact Google and use this tool to contact BingAds
4. Google do not want to be a party to any breaches of trade mark so Google very swiftly removed the adverts and we were notified.
5. The final step is to turn it to your advantage – tell everyone about it via an article and social media

Why not take 30 mins and get a demo of ProgressPlus and find out why these companies wanted to copy ProgressPlus.