General Mills is open to your suggestions
I had an idea I wanted to pass along to General Mills, so I went to their website to email it in. At the top of the suggestions page it says, "We welcome your comments". Below the comments submission box though, is this text:
All comments, suggestions, ideas, notes, drawings, concepts, recipes or other information disclosed or offered to General Mills by this site or in response to solicitations in this site shall be deemed and shall remain the property of General Mills. You understand and acknowledge that General Mills has both internal resources and other external resources which may have developed or may in the future develop ideas identical to or similar to the suggestion or comments to suggestions and that General Mills is only willing to consider the suggestion on these terms. That, in any event, any suggestion is not submitted in confidence and General Mills assumes no obligation express or applied by considering it. Without limitation, General Mills shall exclusively own all now known or hereafter existing rights to the suggestions of every kind and nature throughout the Universe and shall be entitled to unrestricted use of the comments for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise without compensation to the provider of the suggestions.
My favorite part of the above is the bolded piece... that they have rights to the suggestion of every kind and nature throughout the Universe. As if taking my idea and profiting from it on Earth wasn't enough! The Universe? I know they're protecting themselves legally... but this sounds like something a 4 year-old would claim.
Perhaps I'm the one being immature, but after reading the above disclaimer I decided to keep my idea for myself. Are these kinds of controlling policies good for interacting with your customers? Does it show you are really open to a dialogue with your customers? Is it good for innovation?
All comments, suggestions, ideas, notes, drawings, concepts, recipes or other information disclosed or offered to General Mills by this site or in response to solicitations in this site shall be deemed and shall remain the property of General Mills. You understand and acknowledge that General Mills has both internal resources and other external resources which may have developed or may in the future develop ideas identical to or similar to the suggestion or comments to suggestions and that General Mills is only willing to consider the suggestion on these terms. That, in any event, any suggestion is not submitted in confidence and General Mills assumes no obligation express or applied by considering it. Without limitation, General Mills shall exclusively own all now known or hereafter existing rights to the suggestions of every kind and nature throughout the Universe and shall be entitled to unrestricted use of the comments for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise without compensation to the provider of the suggestions.
My favorite part of the above is the bolded piece... that they have rights to the suggestion of every kind and nature throughout the Universe. As if taking my idea and profiting from it on Earth wasn't enough! The Universe? I know they're protecting themselves legally... but this sounds like something a 4 year-old would claim.
Perhaps I'm the one being immature, but after reading the above disclaimer I decided to keep my idea for myself. Are these kinds of controlling policies good for interacting with your customers? Does it show you are really open to a dialogue with your customers? Is it good for innovation?
posted by ROInnovation at 8:27 PM
1 Comments:
In the current world of consumer power and user-generated everything, this is crazy. Yet another example of how the business world can't keep up with the pace of change that is required to stay afloat. It reminds me of a quote I heard from Gary Hamel this week - he said that the world is changing so much, no longer do businesses have all the power - "business used to be able to use consumer ignorance as a profit centre in itself". so glad those days are over...let's watch General Mills and see how they keep up with their anti-ideas attitude!
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