Puffery

A FORM OF deceptive advertising, puffery has immense consequences. The term refers to the practice of making exaggerated claims for a product. Although advertisers routinely make such false claims, and the result is deception, the law considers such practices to be legal. Puffery claims are communicated in the form of unprovable superlatives (that is adjectives such as the best, super, new and improved), often in the form of various advertising slogans:

None of the slogans are based on objective, factual evidence, and, as such, these claims are either false or unsubstantiated. Even though they are considered legal, their intent is to deceive. The goal, as is always in advertising, is to use whatever tactic will sell a product or service. If that includes distorting the truth, so be it.

Even though knowledge concerning puffery in advertising is far from complete, some important facts have emerged from research on this topic. People perceive more content in ads than the ads actually contain. Additional values are perceived by consumers and attached to products. For example, one study of sweaters concluded that, when sweaters were shown with belts and captions were read by someone with a Scottish accent, consumers were twice as likely to perceive that the sweaters were imported. Implied deceptions (puffery claims) are believed more than outright lies. In one study of 17 puff claims, 70 percent of respondents felt the claims were either wholly or partially true.

Puffery claims are often indistinguishable from factual claims. In another study, a sample of 100 people were placed in a room and presented with both real and puff claims. The researchers found that “many of the puff claims were believed by a large proportion of the respondents. The subjects could not tell that these puffs might not be literally true.” Researchers found that the factual claims were believed just as often as the puff claims used in their survey.

Consumers fed a constant diet of puffery ads may confuse fact and fiction. Moreover, they may actually come to distrust advertising, on the one hand, yet unconsciously be manipulated by it on the other. Puffery claims are most often found in lifestyle advertising. These ads usually contain photos of young, attractive men and women depicted in opulent surroundings (for example, beautiful white beaches, penthouse apartments, or luxurious mansions). The photos contain implied promises concerning popularity, sex appeal, power, success, and love—if one uses the product being advertised. The puff claims along with the implied promises in the ads constitute a major form of social structural alienation known as inauthenticity.

Inauthenticity consists of positive overt appearances (that is, the puffery slogans and implied promises) coupled with negative underlying realities that come from a mass consumption lifestyle. This lifestyle includes, for example, consuming dangerous products, generating pollution, depleting resources, chronic indebtedness, envy crimes, and even bankruptcy from spending too much money on mass consumption.

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