You need to be creative when promoting your brand. Sometimes, thinking outside the box means limitless imagination where you don’t follow any rules. Going for the unorthodox methods will help you capture the interest of the public, but that’s all you want to capture—if you’re not careful, you might also call the attention of law enforcement and tarnish the good reputation of your business.
As with other business aspects, you also have to adhere to laws concerning marketing. To advertise your business safely, here are marketing laws you should be aware of before creating and publishing your materials.
Hands Off What Isn’t Yours
Grabbing graphics and content, whether they’re movies, videos, music, or books, is easier on the web. Some tools come with computers and phones that let people copy and paste, download, and screenshot without asking for permission, which puts the original creators in a compromised position. Copyright infringement is in place and can make violators pay a hefty price to protect the creators of such materials.
There are plenty of ways to create content without pirating what others have made. For example, you can buy assets directly from creators or use stock photos and free sources that come without the watermark to craft your own.
Prioritize Children
Children can act on skits and pose for print media and make excellent brand models, but you must follow a fine line when using minors for your campaigns. A child’s privacy can instantly go out the window with ads featuring their faces, given that with social media, it’s easy to find people’s private information. To protect your models—if you decide to employ minors—reading up on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and being aware of its stipulations is imperative. This act stresses that you must get parental permission and obscure personal data (address, email, and other identifiers) from the public. Respecting their work hours will also keep you from being a violator and help the few kids in your team move in a safe environment.
Offer What You Have, No More and No Less
Most brands tend to oversell to make their products more appealing to their market. It’s typical for some companies to highlight their best features and milk them for what they’re worth while only gleaning the adverse effects. Promoting something your product doesn’t have will only spawn misconceptions and land you in deeper trouble.
Instead of overselling, you must choose to be transparent and give your patrons the chance to decide if they’d subscribe to your brand by giving them your pros and cons. For instance, if you do business in the legal field and have tied up with other firms, you should be transparent in what possible clients might go through and what they should expect when looking for seasoned divorce lawyers. Deceptive and false advertising create more problems than help you rake in profit.
Ask for Consent
You can easily solve half of the problems you might encounter in the marketing world by asking for permission. If you want a particular graphic, you can seek out the artist, ask for permission to use it, or buy it if it’s not up for public use. Even on the web, respecting a person’s belongings uproots any potential issues. Live streaming is how most businesses managed to stay in the industry during the pandemic. Without the convenience of meeting customers in person, ventures had to resort to hosting lives on social media to offer services and sell products.
Most play music or film in a beautiful location to create a lively mood and encourage viewers to become paying customers. These may all seem innocuous since most songs are public domain, and there is no concrete way of making anyone pay for playing tunes they have not paid for, but using copyrighted music during your streams can quickly send you downhill. So, before you go on live, you must keep from playing copyrighted music and ask for an owner’s permission if you ever film in a private place.
Support Your Claims for Greener Options
Going green is a clever marketing campaign. People love a sustainable brand because it helps them do their part in preserving the environment. However, most brands abuse this strategy and use it without evidence to support their claims.
If you plan to use this stance to elevate your promotions, it’s best to give people a look at how you’re using eco-friendly materials for manufacturing your products. You can do this by adding a tab on your official website about where you source your items and how you create them without harming the environment.
Promote Within Lawful Bounds
These laws aim to protect your company and your clients, and when you follow them, you can promote your brand successfully without encountering any legal trouble.
