Good afternoon,
I figured I’d ask this here as it seems it could be a learning point.
I noticed yesterday that my local B&Q, and indeed others that are in the surrounding towns, had disappeared from the map and the place points are now showing as being non-editable with a warning box at the top saying “this place is currently advertised”. They’ve also had their name changed to “Tradepoint”, with B&Q as an alternative name, so I’m guessing it’s TradePoint that’s being advertised.
This means that searching for a B&Q, e.g. “B&Q Bognor”, nothing B&Q-related appears in the search box, and instead shows the top result as “TradePoint Bognor Regis” with the TradePoint logo. This is fine if you know that TradePoint is a shop-within-a-shop and will take you to a B&Q store, however if you don’t know, then I feel you could believe that the store either no longer exists, or you’d just use a different navigation app as you don’t think Waze even knows where/what a B&Q is.
I just feel this could potentially cause a trust issue with Waze users, especially if they do it with other companies. Imagine if they changed Sainsbury’s place names to Argos because Argos have an ad campaign running and Sainsbury’s was no longer navigable by name. It’s the same setup: a brand operating within another.
So, I guess my questions are:
- Is it common for Waze to do this, or would it have been B&Q that chose to remove their brand in place of TradePoint?
- Is it something you just have to suffer during these ad campaigns or is there a way to raise this as an issue?
- Why didn’t they just add TradePoint as an additional place marker on the B&Q buildings, kind of like how Sainsbury’s and Argos have with their shop-within-a-shop setup? Or just have TradePoint as an alternative name? Trade users will know that TradePoint is inside B&Q, so they’ll know they’re going to the right place.
I’m not sure if it was the right thing to do, but as a regular user of Waze myself and imagining how frustrating it would be to not be able to find a big-brand store nearby, I added a B&Q marker back for my local store (the only one in my editable range at the time), so at least the search results show the actual brand for anyone looking. I can of course delete it if it was the wrong thing to do. And to be completely honest, I did try and change the name back before noticing it was locked, so I now have a pending update request that has been sent to Waze staff :?. I’m not expecting a response though to be honest.
I’m a stickler for accuracy and convenience, and I suppose I just expect a navigation app to return accurate results (it is the point of it after all!) I also expect to be able to find what I’m looking for easily, so this has somewhat irritated me (maybe slightly irrationally :D).
Craig