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Keep Your Marketing Message Honest
By admin | March 24, 2008
A very important fact to keep in mind when deciding how to present your product or service to the market place is to keep your message honest. Especially when you’re dealing with healthcare, medical and pharmaceutical markets.
Airborne Health, Inc. that markets Airborne, an over the counter cold remedy, made just that mistake. Now they are subject to a 23.3 million dollar class action lawsuit.
The Airborne dietary supplement claims to cure or prevent the flu and colds. But they have little to no facts to back up their claim. It hasn’t been tested by the FDA and what little tests that have been made public were conducted by
Knight-McDowell Labs, the manufacturers of the Airborne product.
Additionally, a medical report on drugs and therapeutics regarding Airborne, along with its emphasis that the evidence of cold prevention or treatment of the formula is inconclusive, gives reason to believe that the supplement is unsafe as directed, specifically regarding its excess of vitamin C:
"There are some concerns. First, there is no conclusive evidence that this product or any of its ingredients prevents colds or shortens their duration. Second, the adult tablet contains 1 g of vitamin C, and the directions for use advise taking 1 tablet at the first sign of a cold and repeating the dose every 3 hours as necessary. Vitamin C in doses higher than 1 g increases oxalate and urate excretion and may cause kidney stones (EN Taylor et al, J Am Soc Nephrol 2004; 15:3225). Third, the safety of this herbal extraction combination has not been established. And with herbs and dietary supplements in general, we only have the manufacturers’ word on the label for what’s in them."[4]
from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_(dietary_supplement)>
Did marketing go above the suggestions of the science department? Or did they simply decide that the money they made would outweigh the damages? Instead of making claims they couldn’t back up (yet) and being labeled as false advertisers, marketing could have come up with other creative measures to boost the sales of the product.
In situations like these marketing and advertising needs to sit down with the science team to brainstorm the best route to take to make a product both safe and marketable. In this case it seems that they should have waited to conduct more thorough testing before it was brought to market.
Ironically, Airborne Health, Inc. claims no wrong doing.
Ultimately, watch your wording. Sometimes it’s as simple as changing the word "will" to "can" or "may." False advertising is easy to avoid and avoiding it is much easier on the bank account.
Topics: Advertising, Copywriting, Freelance Copywriter, Marketing |