Puff Up Your Bragging Judiciously

Jewelry retailer Zales says its Celebration Fire diamonds are the most brilliant in the world. The parent company of competitors Kay Jewelers and Jared the Galleria of Jewelry says Zale is lying. Next week, a federal judge in Ohio is scheduled to decide if the Zales claim is false advertising, which is illegal, or only puffery.
     Puffery consists of lavish, often exaggerated, claims about a store or about products carried by the store. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission doesn’t consider puffery to be illegal lying. That’s because the FTC defines puffery as too subjective for the truth or falsity to be determined.
     Sometimes what’s said is obvious puffery: “We give the best store service you’ll ever find anywhere.” The words are expressing nothing more malicious than exuberant enthusiasm.
     In other cases, the degree of puffery is harder for the consumer to spot because it consists of exaggerated importance placed on a trivial claim: “Our house brand ice cream uses only European flavors.”
     This second sort of puffery does influence shoppers in significant ways, according to University of Mannheim research:

• Draws attention to the complete selling message 
• Impresses the shopper that the alternative is highly distinctive 
• Leaves the purchaser with the impression that the price paid is fair 
• Builds positive attitudes toward the store and/or other items carrying the brand name 

     Should you engage in puffery? Research findings from University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, University of Michigan, and Northwestern University indicate that the effectiveness of the technique depends on the expertise of the shopper, the channel you use to deliver the message, and how you do the comparisons:

• Puffery is more likely to influence consumers to buy a product when the consumers believe other people know more about the particular store or the particular product category than they themselves do. 
• Puffery is more likely to positively influence consumers when delivered by a source the consumers consider to have expertise about shopping for products in the category they’re considering. 
• If presenting the shopper a comparison of three—such as three products you carry—puffery about one of them will influence the shopper to favor that one, but the same puffery about a trivial attribute possessed by two of the three will drastically undercut the influence of the puffery. 
• A risk in using puffery is that consumers who are not positively influenced will lose trust in the retailer’s other, validated, claims of purchase benefits. 

Click below for more: 
Expose Puffery for All It’s Worth 
Sensitize Customers to Degree of Certainty