In the world of marketing, providing customers with information regarding the products and making them look more appealing to the customers is a big deal for companies. Customers tend to be more attracted to the products that meet their values. However, these values can be manipulated by the companies in order to attract customers for the sake of competition. This commonly happens when a low-quality product is advertised as high quality and cheaper than the competitor’s higher-quality product with a higher price. As a consequence, the price sensitive customers are driven to buy a product that they would not have bought if they knew its actual quality attributes. The customers will become victims of marketing misrepresentation that changes their preference and choice.

Companies that utilize such marketing strategies are playing with customers personal values in order to push their sales for the products that would not have had any place in the market if it was not for the misrepresentation.

Another case of misrepresentation could be playing with words in order to trick the customers into believing something about the services or the products of the company that is not actually true. An example of this is what BMW Group did during its marketing campaign for mini cooper. Susanna Kim wrote an article about this matter on abc news’ website that can be accessed here. http://goo.gl/YFfgB1

In this article, Kim says a key selling feature of the mini coopers were the warranty and services program introduce by the BMW group. The program “promised to ‘maximize vehicle safety, reliability, and resale value by minimizing breakdowns resulting from wear, and minimizing cost and inconvenience”. (Kim 2013)

In addition the cars were advertised as having “lifetime transmission fluid”. This made many customers believe that there would be no need of regular engine fluid change. As a result, premature transmission failures happened. This contradicted the marketing campaign message of mini cooper, and led to a lawsuit against BMW group.

Companies are responsible for respecting customers’ values and providing them products and information that does not trick customers for the sake of pushing sales and competition purposes.