About a year back, Windows started a campaign “Smoked by Windows Phone” where they asked non-windows phone users to compete in performing basic tasks on their phone against a Windows phone. Should the Windows phone lose, Microsoft would give a free laptop to the challenger. 
However, a challenger did manage to beat a Windows phone with his own phone when asked to pull up the weather in two cities, the Microsoft Store employees refused to acknowledge his win.
This form of promotion, although showing Microsoft’s confidence in its own products means nothing if it does nothing to uphold its end of the deal and refuses to reward people after a fair win. Although I think that it is a brilliant marketing campaign as it uses competition, which everyone loves as evidenced by the numerous amount of TV shows focused on competitions. Now, having the confidence to directly “compete” against other phones, Microsoft should have been ready to acknowledge that it could not win every single battle. Instead, they chose to disregard a legitimate loss.
Through this bad decision, Microsoft may have just caused more bad publicity than good in this marketing campaign. It was in essence, false advertising. This sort of unethical behavior will keep many people away from its products. After all, a company’s ethics says a lot about the company. If it does not uphold its promises, how can consumers be sure that the company even upholds the promises in its products?
To be fair, Microsoft ended up apologizing on Twitter the damage was already done. However, that initial refusal to award a laptop to an actual winner simply speaks a lot about the company and will most likely linger in many people’s memories. Although I’ve known about this incident close to when it first came out, I completely forgot about Microsoft apologizing. One unethical move left me with a very bad impression, as I am sure it has done for others as well.