Recently I have noticed (maybe they have been there all along I just never noticed) that the diet informercial are plastering all over themselves “Results not typical.”
Now I see a car ad with the statement “Loan rate not avaiable to most applicants” and “Exceptional Credit required for this rate”
Granted they are getting more honest but this is so misleading. Obviously you are intested in buying a product but if the 12 examples they give all say “results not typical” that doesn’t really tell you anything. What are the typical results"
Or is this there way of subliminally saying “You’ll never lose weight and you can’t get the loan to pay for the lipo.”
The addition of the “Results not typical” tagline is fairly recent - maybe 10 years or even less. The reason why it is there is because the federal government cracked down on the diet industry because real results are so poor. I used to see the same ads without that copy - thus implying that these results were typical.
Why they don’t tell you the typical results is because they couldn’t sell you the diet plan otherwise. I don’t have my book with me, but you basically have a one in 250 chance of losing weight and keeping it off for two years. The average dieter gains 15 pounds.
They aren’t subliminally telling you you won’t lose weight. They’re trying to con you into believing you will, without getting on the wrong side of the law.
So tell me, Markxxx, just what is the General Question here? The best guesses I have are “Isn’t this misleading?” and “Why do they do this?”, but judging from your OP, you already know both answers. If, as I suspect, you post is not actually saying “Is this misleading?”, but rather “This is misleading”, then you’re in the wrong forum: Rants, however mild, belong in the BBQ Pit.
