Hammonds has been told to stop using a misleading discount countdown timer advertisement after a complain by rival bedroom brand Sharps.
Hammonds’ website featured a banner ad claiming ‘Up to 40% off selected finishes + an extra 5% offer ends in […]” and included a countdown timer showing the apparent days, hours and minutes left in the promotion.
Sharps challenged whether the use of the countdown clock was misleading, because it understood the promotion was available for a further week after the countdown ended.
Hammonds told the Advertising Standards Authority that the countdown timer related to the ‘extra 5%’ offer, and was due to expire four days after Sharps viewed the banner. Its terms and conditions stated that the ‘extra 5%’ offer also expired on that date. They stated that the claim The ‘up to 40% off’ referred to a separate promotion which ended a week later, it said, saying that consumers would understand that the countdown referred to the ‘extra 5%’ offer, and that the ‘extra 5%’ discount would not be available after the timer expired.
The ASA ruled that the text was displayed as a continuous sentence in the same size and font, and there were no stylistic differences or large spaces between the phrases ‘up to 40% off’ and ‘extra 5% offer’ that indicated they were separate offers.
‘Because consumers would expect [the ad] to refer to one discount which was due to expire after the countdown clock ended when this was not the case, and because the countdown clock was likely to pressurise consumers into making a swift transactional decision, we concluded that the ad was misleading,’ says the ASA.
The ASA also ruled against Hammonds in a price comparison claim, where it found the retailer had intimated that its prices were the lowest whereas it operated a price-matching scheme.
