Quote:
Originally Posted by Devils'Advocate
But in this case, the claim isn't that their product gets your clothes cleaner or that the gums taste lasts longer. It's that they make you believe that a forest will be saved, or waterways not polluted or the air will be cleaner for everyone. And if company A who actually are producing a clean product is put at a disadvantage to company B who is producing a dirty product and just lying to the consumer, I don't think that fair. And fair may not be a part of capitalism, so I think government needs to play a role in verifying company A vs company B's claims.
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It's still just the same-old, same-old though as far as marketing strategies go. Marketing firms have always stretched and bent the truth to the limit to try and give their clients an advantage over competitors.
The government has never shown much interest in the past in policing dirty marketing tactics, probably because the guys who own marketing companies have typically been in bed with the government. Ad scam may not have been about false marketing methods, but it involved the same companies.
I doubt the government is going to get involved now, unless the Conservatives are a whole lot more upright than the Liberals were, which is dubious. I'm not sure what the current state of marketing and advertising laws are, but when I took a course on this back in the 1980s it was pretty much controlled by industry set standards that relied heavily on voluntary compliance and self-policing. Self-policing is usually akin to putting the fox in charge of the hen house, and means just don't get caught in anything overt. There were laws for some of the most extreme stuff, but by and large stuff could be worded in such a way as to be more implied than stated and nothing could done about it.
A classic example of dubious marketing phrases: "New and scientifically improved." That's a totally meaningless phrase, but it leads consumers to draw all kinds of assumptions on their own, none of which have any basis in reality.
That's the same BS as they're talking about in the article. "Planet-friendly" and "all natural" are phrases the imply something to consumers, but when you get a pack of corporate lawyers dissecting their meaning in a court room things get pretty hazy in a hurry. "BPA-free" however makes a specific claim, and if a company making that claim isn't telling the truth then they might be guilty of false marketing. It would still come down to who has the biggest legal budget. The tobacco companies proved that for many decades.
Coles notes: marketing is a sleazy game with little or no ethics.