Creating Business Practices That Support Longevity and Success

Chapter One Legal Practices to Protect Your Company and Your Customers

Legal practices are designed to facilitate effective communication with your customers. They're also designed to help protect you and your customers.

Before we discuss the common practices and policies you may want to create, let's first take a look at the basic principles that will guide your policy making decisions.

Truth and Honesty

This principle applies most specifically to online advertising, marketing and use of technology. In a nutshell, any communications, marketing messages, or advertisements must be 100% truthful and honest.

When creating any marketing or advertising message (autoresponder, PPC, text ad, banner ad etc.) consider these recommendations provided by the Better Business Bureau:

· Always engage in truthful advertising. Don't use deceptive or misleading representations or omissions of material facts.

· Be able to substantiate any claims made in your advertising or marketing. (This includes price comparisons.)

· Don't intentionally or unintentionally mislead customers, prospects or visitors by creating the false impression of sponsorship, endorsement, popularity, trustworthiness, product quality or business size through the misuse of hyperlinks, "seals", other technology, or another's intellectual property.

· Don't misleadingly use hyperlinks or information provided via a hyperlink to:

Contradict or substantially change the meaning of any material statement or claim, Create the false impression of affiliation, Create the false impression that the content, merchandise or service of another's business is your own.

· Make sure that any third-party "seals" or endorsements that incorporate links to self-regulatory or ethical standard programs are functional so that customers can easily verify membership in the seal program and determine its purpose, scope and standards.

Embracing this concept is easy. When you create advertisements for your business, make sure you don't misrepresent yourself, your company or your products, and be prepared to back up any claim you make.

Ultimately this doesn't affect your published policies and practices, unless you choose to make a blanket statement about truth in advertising. However, it does affect how you create your ads and whom you hire to create marketing messages. You'll want to make sure they understand the importance of truth and honesty.

Transparency and authenticity are important to your brand, credibility, customer relationships and profits. And when you embrace truth and honesty in your business practices, you'll not only attract the kind of people you want to do business with, you'll also stay out of hot water with the government.

To give an example of how this can affect your business, let's look at the weight loss industry, specifically the practices of selling diet pills and other weight loss programs.

In the past, many programs did their advertising using exaggerated claims and "once in a lifetime" testimonials. In other words, they led their customers to believe that they could easily lose 20 pounds, when in reality few customers had that experience.

On top of that, many companies were deceptive in the ways they represented the user's financial commitment. Many companies advertised themselves as "free offers" while in reality the customer had to call and cancel or else get charged.

Because the industry as a whole got away with it for so long, both these practices just became commonplace. Then the FTC got involved.

At this point, there were two different kinds of companies: