Ad description
A website for Oak Furniture Solutions, a furniture retailer, seen in June 2017, featured a “Milano Oak Nest of 3 Tables” product and next to this product included text which stated “Wood Type: Oak … Surface Material: Oak” and “The Milano Oak rave is a chunky range crafted from carefully selected high grade oak”.
Issue
The complainant, who understood that the product was made of oak veneer and non-oak components, challenged whether the claims were misleading.
Response
Contemporary Oak Furniture Ltd said the product had an oak frame with hardwood solids and an oak Veneer on the panel in the middle of it. They said that was an oak veneer and not an oak laminate as the customer referred to. They said the complainant had stated that they should have been using the terms Oak effect and oak colour, but they believed that would only have been accurate as a description if the item was not oak. They said the majority of the item was oak with a small amount of hardwood solids in the top panel of each table. They did not provide any further substantiation in support.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA considered that consumers would understand the claims “Wood Type: Oak … Surface Material: Oak” and “The Milano Oak rave is a chunky range crafted from carefully selected high grade oak”, including the product description which stated “Milano Oak Nest of 3 Tables”, to mean the product was made from oak.
The complainant believed the product was made from non-oak components and veneer. Because the advertiser did not provide us with any evidence to demonstrate the product was made from oak, we concluded the ad’s claims had not been substantiated and were misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules
3.1
3.1
Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.
and
3.3
3.3
Marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material information. They must not mislead by hiding material information or presenting it in an unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely manner.
Material information is information that the consumer needs to make informed decisions in relation to a product. Whether the omission or presentation of material information is likely to mislead the consumer depends on the context, the medium and, if the medium of the marketing communication is constrained by time or space, the measures that the marketer takes to make that information available to the consumer by other means.
(Misleading Advertising) and
3.7
3.7
Before distributing or submitting a marketing communication for publication, marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove claims that consumers are likely to regard as objective and that are capable of objective substantiation. The ASA may regard claims as misleading in the absence of adequate substantiation.
(Substantiation).
Action
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Contemporary Oak Furniture Ltd to ensure their advertising did not misleadingly imply their products were made from oak.
