From Investor’s Business Daily:
Over the last year, personal computer maker Dell has faced a barrage of complaints online from angry customers on consumer affairs sites and Web logs…
Complaints against Dell had a grass-roots flavor until recently. But on Sept. 27, IBD received a five-pound FedEx package containing nearly 500 pages of consumer complaints — mostly printouts of complaints lodged at “complaint” Web sites — against Dell. The stack of documents had a title page reading “Dell Consumer Complaints.”
The sender forged the return address as the Better Business Bureau in Natick, Mass., and didn’t include a name. The Natick BBB says it didn’t send the items and doesn’t know who did.
The same package was sent to multiple technology journalists, according to officials at the BBB and Dell, responding to queries about it.
Was the mailing the action of an upset Dell customer? Not likely.
“My sense is that it comes from a competitor,” said Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates. HP would be the chief suspect, he says. HP executives deny that they were behind the mailing.
Kay calls the mailing a “cheap shot.” It contains complaints from My3cents.com, Ripoffreport.com and other sources.
Is this a PR dirty trick?
Probably. I’m pretty confident that someone at one of Dell’s competitors sent these packets out. But I doubt it’s a PR department.
Why? I’ll skip the part about PR people having spotless ethics and cut to the chase: Any PR department would have to deny it when questioned by reporters; if later found to be lying, the perpetrating company would fare worse than Dell in the court of public opinion, and the PR head would watch said head roll.
I like to nip potential conspiracy theories in the bud when I can.
(And no, I don’t think Jeff Jarvis mailed them out, either.)
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