Misleading advertising seeks to captivate the consumer through false information.
Misleading advertising is advertising that presents false information or seeks to cause confusion in people.
All advertising consists of making an advertisement known : it is usually a message with commercial intent that aims to seduce potential clients, users or buyers. While advertisements always highlight positive aspects of what they intend to sell in order to encourage consumers, the purpose of misleading advertising is, as the expression suggests, to deceive the recipient.
Anyone who observes misleading advertising will form an idea about the product or service that does not match reality . This will result in the individual spending their money on something that has different characteristics than what they assume according to what is appreciated in their advertising.
Needless to say, no company recognizes its involvement in this type of advertising manipulation. There are various legal mechanisms that allow a judge to determine if a company engaged in misleading advertising to confuse consumers: based on this analysis, the judge can apply a punishment .
Example of false advertising
Suppose a fast food chain offers a new hamburger . In a television advertisement, it shows a huge hamburger that barely fits on a plate and is quite thick, surrounded by dozens of slices of cucumber and tomato.
In restaurants, in reality, consumers end up receiving a small, very thin hamburger, served with a slice of cucumber and no tomato. In short, it can be said that the company carried out misleading advertising.
The buyer seduced by misleading advertising suffers disappointment when accessing the product in question.
The analysis of the information
Unlike the era in which we only saw our desired products in television commercials, in the press or in paper catalogues, today we have at our disposal various means through which we can access detailed tables. of specifications, text and video analysis , comparisons and testing. This can lead us to think that we are much better informed than in the past and, therefore, protected from misleading advertising; Reality, very distant, shows us that data saturation makes us less attentive to this sales tactic .
It should be noted that there are certain products whose design is closed, such as video game consoles, which seem to show a certain immunity to misleading advertising, at least once the public is fully aware of their characteristics; A computer store cannot try to sell a console with a 3-core processor by advertising 8 because consumers know that it is not common for video game companies to release two such different versions of their products.
The real hell for consumers is found especially in computers, mobile phones and tablets, although the latter two are the most susceptible to misleading advertising, since they target a less knowledgeable audience. If we combine the subtle differences that we find between one specification table and another (or even within the same web page), with the various reviews that companies put on the market for the same product (in which case there may be small variations), It is practically impossible to know exactly what we are buying, unless we go to a physical store and try the product with our own hands.
One of the resources that many companies have up their sleeve to defend themselves against the accusation of having advertised their products in a misleading manner is the excuse of not having directly developed the campaign. Nowadays it is very common to hire third parties to develop videos, banners and descriptive articles, so it is easy to blame them for any inconsistencies in specific data .