Deceptive Marketing:

Deceptive marketing is the use of false or misleading statements in advertising. There are five
types through which it may be:

(1) a false statement of fact has been made about the advertiser's own or another person's
goods, services, or commercial activity.
(2) the statement either deceives or has the potential to deceive a substantial portion of its
targeted audience
(3) the deception is also likely to affect the purchasing decisions of its audience
(4) the advertising involves goods or services in interstate commerce
(5) the deception has either resulted in or is likely to result in injury to the plaintiff.

Pricing-based methods:

Hidden fees and surcharges

Service providers often tack on fees and surcharges that are not disclosed to the customer in the
advertised price. One of the most common is for activation of services such as mobile phones,
but is also common in broadband, telephony and air travel. In most cases, the fees are hidden in
fine print, though in a few cases they are so confused and obfuscated by ambiguous terminology
that they are essentially undisclosed. Hidden fees are frequently used in airline and air travel
advertising.

"Going out of business" sales

In many cases, the liquidators which are hired to sell merchandise from a closing store will
actually raise the prices on items that were already marked-down on clearance. For items already
marked-down to 50% off, this means the liquidator is doubling the price (quadrupling it for a
75%-off price), and then "discounting" it from there. Also common is for the sale prices at a
retail chain's other stores to be lower than the liquidator's prices at the closing stores. Both of
these were proven to be the case in November 2008, with the same liquidator (Hilco) committing
both offenses: the markups at Linens 'n Things, and the higher prices on around one-third of the
items compared to other Circuit City stores remaining open. Additionally, liquidators refuse to
accept returns, so if a customer does find he or she has been overcharged, there is no apparent
recourse.

Other deceptive methods

Manipulation of standards

Sellers may manipulate standards to mean something different than their widely-understood
meaning. One example is with personal computer hard drives. While a megabyte has always
meant 220 (1,048,576) bytes in computer science, disk manufacturers began using the irrelevant
metric system (SI) prefix meaning of 106 (1,000,000). By stating the sizes of hard drives in
'megabytes' of 1,000,000 bytes instead of 1,048,576, they overstate capacity by nearly 5%. With
gigabytes, the error increases to over 7% (1,073,741,824 instead of 1,000,000,000), and nearly
10% for the newer terabyte. Seagate Technology and Western Digital, were sued in a class-
action suit for this. Both companies agreed to settle the suit and reimburse customers in-kind, yet
they still continue to advertise this way

Fillers and oversized packaging

Some products are sold with fillers, which increase the legal weight of the product with
something that costs the producer very little compared to what the consumer thinks that he or she
is buying. Food is an example of this, where chicken meat is injected with broth or even brine
(up to 15%), or TV dinners are filled with gravy or other sauce instead of meat. Malt and Cocoa
Butter have been used as a color filler in peanut butter

Undefined terms

Many terms do have some meaning, but the specific extent is not legally defined, leading to their
abuse. A frequent example (until the term gained a legal definition) was "organic" food. "Light"
food also is an even more common manipulation. The term has been variously used to mean low
in calories, sugars, carbs, salt, texture, thickness (viscosity), or even light in color. Tobacco
companies, for many years, used terms like "low tar", "light", "ultra-light", "mild" or "natural",
but in recent years it was proved that those terms were considered misleading.

Another example is the United Egg Producers' "Animal Care Certified" logo on egg cartons
which misled consumers by conveying a higher level of animal care than was actually the case.
Both the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission found the logo to be
deceptive and the original logo can no longer be used

Remedies for deceptive Advertising:

Corrective Advertising

Corrective advertising can be ruled in two different ways. First, and most commonly, the court
can require a defendant to launch a corrective advertising campaign and to make an affirmative,
correcting statement in that campaign. For example, in Alpo, the court required Purina to
distribute a corrective release to all of those who had received the initial, false information.

Second, the courts can award a plaintiff monetary damages so that the plaintiff can conduct a
corrective advertising campaign to counter the defendant's false advertisements. For example, in
U-Haul International v. Jartran, Inc., 793 F.2d 1034 (9th Cir. 1986), the plaintiff, U-Haul
International, was awarded $13.6 million— the cost of its corrective advertising campaign.

Damages
To collect damages, the plaintiff generally has to show either that some consumers were actually
deceived or that the defendant used the false advertising in bad faith. Four types of damages are
awarded for false advertising: profits the plaintiff loses when sales are diverted to the false
advertiser; profits lost by the plaintiff on sales made at prices reduced as a demonstrated result of
the false advertising; the cost of any advertising that actually and reasonably responds to the
defendant's offending advertisements; and quantifiable harm to the plaintiff's good will to the
extent that complete and corrective advertising has not repaired that harm (Alpo).