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All our thoughts and advice in one place.

Start here Your customers can’t hear the tune in your head Tap a song on a table and almost nobody can name it. Your readers have the same problem with your content. Here’s why it happens and how to fix it. Stand out5 min
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Our advice 8

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Blog Stand out 7 min read

"Everyone does it" won't save you when the crackdown comes

Sarah Impey Marketing Director and Consultant

In the 1890s, Clark Stanley was selling Snake Oil Liniment across America. According to the label, it could fix everything from toothache to frostbite.

Contents

It couldn't. When government chemists finally tested it in 1916, there wasn't any snake in it. Just mineral oil and beef fat. He was fined $20.

Stanley wasn't the only one at it, though. Patent medicines were everywhere, and loads of them were just as dodgy. In fact, people were already onto the scams long before Stanley. Collier's Weekly ran an exposé on the whole trade in 1905, and a year later, the US passed the Pure Food and Drug Act.

That law applied to everyone. Every seller had to print what was actually in the bottle, including the alcohol and morphine that plenty of them relied on. Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup (sold to calm teething babies) had to take the morphine out and drop "soothing" from its name. Sales fell. And every time sellers found a loophole, the government closed it, first in 1912 and again in 1938.

"Snake oil salesman" has been an insult ever since.

The lesson? If customers don't like something and you're only doing it because everyone else does, someone's going to get caught for it eventually. When they do, you'll go down with them.

So don't do that thing.

The snake oil salesmen never went away

Despite the story and new regulations, we still see companies pushing the limits of what they should do almost daily. Here are just a few recent examples:

A "sense of pride and accomplishment”

In 2017 EA launched Star Wars Battlefront II, a full-price game where you could pay real money for loot boxes (random prizes that helped you win). Players worked out it would take around 40 hours to unlock Darth Vader without paying. EA's reply on Reddit said the idea was to give players "a sense of pride and accomplishment." It got about 668,000 downvotes and a Guinness World Record for the most downvoted comment. EA pulled paid loot boxes a few months later.

But EA wasn't the only one selling them, so the whole industry got the blame. Belgium ruled loot boxes were illegal gambling in 2018. Brazil banned selling them to under-18s in 2026, and a Brazilian court has since ordered Riot Games and ten other companies to pay more than 300 million reais between them (around £45m).

Easy to sign up, hard to leave

In 2025, Amazon paid $2.5bn to settle a US case over how hard it made Prime to cancel. Plenty of subscription businesses make leaving a pain. Amazon just got caught doing it at a very large scale. And if your business relies on people forgetting to cancel, UK rules are coming for that too, probably in spring 2027.

Surprise, surprise, there's another fee

You know the feeling. You pick your tickets, head to checkout, and the price creeps up. Surprise fees like that have been banned in the UK since April 2025. StubHub's already been fined nearly £900,000, and the AA and BSM driving schools were fined £4.2m for the same thing. After the Oasis sale, the CMA also made Ticketmaster promise to show fans the full range of prices before they'd even joined the queue.

You paid for it, but you don't own it

When Ubisoft switched off The Crew in 2024, people who'd paid for the game couldn't play it anymore. That's legal, for now. But it kicked off Stop Killing Games, a campaign that's got 1.29 million verified signatures and is sitting with the European Commission. If that turns into a law, it won't only apply to Ubisoft.

A monthly fee for seats you already own

In 2022, BMW started charging drivers in the UK and a few other countries a monthly fee (about $18) to turn on heated seats that were already fitted in the car. People were furious. BMW dropped it in 2023, and its head of product communications admitted it "was probably not the best way to start." This one never got as far as a regulator. BMW backed down first.

None of these businesses set out to annoy their customers (at least, we hope not). Most of them were doing what everyone else was doing, or they were chasing profits without really thinking about what was best for the end customer (or what people actually wanted).

Blindly copying competitors can backfire

It's easy to look at what your competitors are doing and assume they've thought it through. A lot of the time, they haven't.

  • It might be illegal already. And you never know when the regulators will turn their attention to the rule and start enforcing it properly.
  • It might not be illegal, yet. Loot boxes were perfectly legal when EA started selling them. Switching off a game people paid for is legal today. But laws catch up eventually. And when they do, they apply to everyone.
  • They might not have done their homework. A competitor doing something doesn't mean it works. You could just be copying a bad habit they picked up from someone else.
  • It might not fit your values (or your customers). People who buy a BMW expect it to feel premium. Paying monthly for something that's already in the car felt like the opposite.
  • Fixing it later is a lot more painful. Ask Amazon. $2.5bn is what it looks like when the bill finally lands.

Be the business people still trust when it kicks off

Next time you notice yourself copying something a competitor does, or following ‘trends’ in your industry, stop and ask why:

  • Why do we actually do this?
  • Would we still do it if nobody else did?
  • What do our customers really think of it?

If you'd be embarrassed explaining it to a customer's face, you've got your answer.

Then picture the worst case. Imagine it's in the news tomorrow, or banned next year. How much would you have to change, and how would your customers feel when they found out?

That matters more than you might think. Customers are already wary of brands. 62% of UK consumers say they trust marketing content less since brands started using AI. And when something goes wrong, they talk. Qualtrics asked more than 23,000 consumers what they did after a bad experience. Nearly half told friends and family. Only a third told the company. It takes years to earn people's trust, so that ‘quick win’ can annoy them and wipe it out.

So fix those issues early. Be proactive. It might not pay off today. But when it all kicks off, you can put your hand up and say: "We completely agree with the customer. In fact, we've been doing what they're asking for, for years." And you'll be the one business on the market people still trust.

Some businesses are already there

So don’t be a sheep. The excuse “well, everyone else is doing it” won’t hold up in court. Or with your customers.

Not sure what your snake oil is?

Most industries have something customers put up with but don't like, and it's hard to spot from the inside. Talk to us, and we'll take a look with fresh eyes. Or come and meet the team at one of our events.

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