Saturday, February 6, 2010
Vague-arang!!!!!
Vague statements are all over advertisements. Examples I always see are on cereal boxes. As a marketing tool most cereal boxes today have something along the lines of “50% less fat.” When a consumer who is concerned with their health sees this, right away it makes them more inclined to buy that particular cereal. However, if you stop and think about it, the sentence is very vague. What does it mean by 50% less fat. Does it mean 50% less than their old cereal? 50% less than the average cereal? It can be misleading because even if its 50% less it all depends on how much fat there was to begin with. What if whatever they were comparing it to had originally 2 pounds of fat. A cereal that contains 50% of that still contains 1 pound of fat. If the consumer knew that he or she would not buy it. However, because its vague consumers don’t stop to think about it and are just drawn to the 50% less fat claim.
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It's amazing how companies will do anything to make their product marketable. It's very easy for them to choose their words, and to pass off only part of the claim as the whole thing. Like you say, sometimes the claim projected is true, but it doesn't necessarily make it a better product when you look at the numbers behind their claims. As a consumer, you want to hopefully get rid of this type of discrete advertising, but the companies aren't doing anything wrong. All they have to do is put what they don't want you to see in very small print.
ReplyDeleteI read the first line of your comment, Vesuviust, and that combined with the story about the cereal reminded me of this.
ReplyDeletehttp://xkcd.com/641/
I agree about the vague claims being misleading. I think what is most confusing is when you go to the supermarket to buy something, and when you see a vague claim on something, like 50% less fat or whatever, you think, "That sounds like the better product", because the other companies don't advertise that on their products either, so the one with 50% less fat must be better, because if they put it on their product then it must be true right? Because if they were lying then the government would make them change the claim or remove the claim from the product I would think.
You bring up a very good example of a vague statement and how vagueness is used to lure people in to but a product. A vague sentence is sort of like an eye catcher to get someone interested in the product. I never found myself even thinking something like a cereal box could be just as vague as anything else. It was clever of you to think of such an example that is really an everyday occurrence. The example that I used was when asking for the time someone responding with half past three or just after five o’ clock each statement can mean a different time to anyone.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the marketing example that you have related to this topic. Not even just cereal boxes, but commercial advertisements.
ReplyDeleteI good example I can related to is proactive. I had bought it for a year and it claimed to help you after 6-9 weeks. It depends on person to person, But I had tried it for a year and it didn't help at all. Nothing had changed on my face and I lost of an estimate of #400. It should at least say "This product doesn't work on everyone."
Overall false advertising needs to be stopped.