According to BrandWeek, Carlsbad-based company TaylorMade is suing competitor Nickent over ads that the company has been running on TV and in print that “lead consumers to believe that its 4DX driver is the No. 1 driver model on the PGA Tour and Nationwide Tour.”
“Occasionally fringe companies in the industry try to encroach on our territory as the No. 1 driver in golf by misrepresenting the facts,” said Bob Maggiore, TMaG’s vp-marketing. “Being the No. 1 driver model at a Nationwide Tour event does not equate to being the No. 1 driver on tour. TaylorMade has been the No. 1 driver brand on the PGA Tour, as well as the Nationwide Tour, since 2001. That more than qualifies us to question Nickent’s logic and judgment in making claims that are misleading at best, and blatantly false at worst.”
See what tough times in the golf industry lead to? Semantics battles.
[Link: BrandWeek]
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In response to a lawsuit filed March 20, 2008 by TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company against Nickent Golf concerning the success of Nickent 4DX drivers on the Nationwide Tour, Nickent Golf issued the following statement:
“Nickent Golf was informed Friday that one of it’s competitors, TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company, has filed a lawsuit involving our advertisement that a Nickent 4DX driver had finished as the #1 overall driver model at the Moonah Classic, the most recent 2008 Nationwide Tour. We are a small company with great products, and we wanted to tout the fact that we have a driver that is good enough to finish as the #1 driver model in a Nationwide Tour event.
There has been no misleading information disseminated by Nickent, as the Darrell Survey, the mechanism responsible for keeping track of golf club equipment usage at professional events, clearly shows that the Nickent 4DX T Spec was the #1 driver model at the Nationwide Tour Moonah Classic with 28 clubs in play. It was the first time Nickent has taken the #1 driver model distinction on the Nationwide Tour and it was deemed worthy of a small advertising campaign, especially since the event was the Nationwide Tour’s most recent.
Our advertising simply portrays what took place at the 3rd and 4th events of the 2008 Nationwide Tour season. Nickent operated within accepted advertising standards. The golf industry is historically rich with challenges from competitors on one another’s tour claims, so this action is no surprise to us. It is a compliment that TaylorMade would come after an up-start like Nickent over a truthful statement that our 4DX T Spec was the current #1 driver model from an event on the Nationwide Tour. We do have the right to inform the golfing public of this fact.
At the end of the day, we know what we have accomplished and how to get that message across. Our television ad states that we “have finished as high as the #1 driver model and the #2 overall wood on the 2008 Nationwide Tour, “and it stated the event at which this was achieved. The numbers displayed in the TaylorMade press release are irrelevant for Nationwide driver model counts, and it is our belief they did this in an effort to confuse the issue at hand. The actual driver model counts from the 2008 Nationwide Tour show a much closer driver model count comparison than was portrayed by the PGA TOUR numbers used in their press release. We have made our home on the Nationwide Tour and regularly tout the accomplishments that we have earned on this growing and popular professional tour. TaylorMade has been calling themselves the #1 Driver on Tour for years, and when someone finally came along and knocked them off that lofty perch, even if only for a few events, it obviously made an impression.
That being said, we have no ill will towards TaylorMade and we will continue to fight the rough and tough driver battle on the professional tours as best we can.”