Law Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for legal professionals, students, and others with experience or interest in law. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
If a company claims that their product is superior to competitors' products and demonstrates their superiority by making an apples to oranges comparison (e.g. our product with default settings is better than competitor's product with quality settings manually turned off and contrary to default and recommended proactive) is that illegal?
What legal or other recourse is possible?
What legal ... recourse is possible?
One could make a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) being the UK’s independent regulator of advertising across all media.
The ASA enforces the following Codes depending on where and how an advert is published:
Code of Broadcast Advertising which applies to all advertisements (including teleshopping, content on self-promotional television channels, television text and interactive TV adverts) and programme sponsorship credits on radio and television services licensed by Ofcom.
Code of Non-broadcast Advertising and Direct & Promotional Marketing which is the rule book for non-broadcast advertisements, sales promotions and direct marketing communications.
Both Codes, sections 3.33 to 3.37, cover instances of "Comparisons with Identifiable Competitors" and use identical wording to require either "Marketing communications" or "Advertisements" (respectively):
... that include a comparison with an identifiable competitor must not mislead, or be likely to mislead, the consumer about either the advertised product or the competing product.
The ASA has a variety of sanctions available to it to deal with Code breaches ranging from damaging an offending advertiser’s reputation via bad publicity to referring the case to either Trading Standards or Ofcom who have their own statutory powers - including the possibility to prosecute serious or serial offenders.
