By Elmer on January 13, 2010

While the saying, imitation is a sincere form of flattery has a point, we certainly don’t feel flattered by someone who copies our work and post it as theirs. While working remotely, we were flabbergasted to discover our email marketing product BeansMail has been copied in its entirety by an EDM wannabe, www.myedm.hk (no link love for you).

The real Beansmail website.

BeansMail wannabe myEDM.hk’s website.

If it took us several weeks to agree on the design, argue on content and sleepless nights to come up with the best business plan to make it work, perhaps the copycats could have only took a few hours to set up the site, change the logo, contact information and set the site online. How can such individual have the guts to copy other people’s idea be blatant in displaying a product as theirs? Has marketing in Hong Kong sunk into a new low or we’re just highlighting folks who still practice stone age marketing?

We looked at the domain details and found out that the culprit was a company based in Kowloon.

Given name: JACK
Family name: LAM
Company name: TOP RICH (HK) INVESTMENT LIMITED
Address: UNIT O, 5/F, BLOCK 3, CAMELPAINT BUILDING, NO. 60 HO YUEN ROAD, KWUN TONG, KOWLOON, HK.
Country: HK
Phone: +852–31505808
Fax:
Email: jack.lam@topsys.hk
Account Name: HK2281609T

But even if we didn’t check that information, we would have known anyway. The contact details of this pretender is proudly displayed on the website. We could call the number and scream at the top of our lungs as a way to complain, but we decide not to. We’ll take another route.

In a nutshell, copying a website intended for email marketing is simply an indication of what a company can and can’t do. If they copied our website content, it’s not a far-fetched idea that they’ll copy someone other people’s email template or text content too. While we await for their response to our call to explain this action, we’ll continue to think that imitation is a sincere form of flattery.

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