Ad description

A website for the Good Garage Scheme, www.goodgaragescheme.com, stated "The Good Garage Scheme. Looking for a local garage you can trust for a car service, MOT or car repair? Using the Good Garage Scheme, you can find a Good Garage Scheme member near you. Be assured that every garage listed performs services to a strict Code of Conduct and will always have your best interests at heart … ". The page also featured a counter, which read "644062" at the time the complainant saw it, and was labelled "Total Customer Feedbacks".

Issue

The complainant, whose negative feedback about a garage had not been published and who believed that the advertisers only posted positive feedback, challenged whether the ad, and particularly the claim on the feedback counter "Total Customer Feedbacks 644062", was misleading because it implied that all feedback about garages was posted.

Response

ITW Ltd t/a Forte Lubricants, who administered the Good Garage Scheme (GGS), stated that the number of instances of feedback recorded on the counter was correct and was the total number of customer feedback items that the Good Garage Scheme had received since its launch in 2006. They stated that the number was equal to the sum of all the feedback scores included in each of the garage reviews, and were used to calculate each garage's score. They said that all feedback was listed individually on the administration side of the site and provided a screenshot of the administration home page. This page contained reviews from 29 May, and stated that there were 650731 items at that time. GGS also provided a screenshot of the website's public home page, which showed the counter displaying a total of 650731 instances of feedback. GGS stated that feedback scores were always posted on the website and that they administered the comments posted on the site in accordance with their acceptable use policy.

GGS also provided screenshots showing the customer ratings and comments for two garages on the scheme. These screenshots both contained negative comments about the garages, including one where the garage had used a 'right to reply' facility to respond to the comment. One of these screenshots showed ratings of close to 80% for the GGS's four categories, an aggregate score that totalled the mean of the four categories, and star ratings of four out of five.

GGS told us that the complainant's feedback had been placed on hold pending the verification of his concerns with an independent assessor, and that the complainant had been informed. They said that, after being provided with a copy of the garage's response to his feedback, which contested many of the points that had been made, the complainant had refused to take the investigation further and so the feedback was not added to the site.

Assessment

Not upheld

The ASA considered that consumers were likely to assume that the number on the counter related to all feedback submitted and accepted under the terms of the site, and that reviews would not be selectively published on the basis of their positivity. We noted that the acceptable use policy of the site required factual statements made by users to be accurate, and understood that GGS had a system in place to verify complaints made in feedback before it was published. We considered that it was reasonable to hold the feedback from being published while specific comments were investigated, without this amounting to selective publication, and that the refusal of the complainant to proceed with this process was justifiable grounds to decide not to publish the feedback, especially as many points were contested by the garage. We noted that GGS had demonstrated that there were negative reviews for some of the garages on the scheme, that aggregate scores could fall below five stars and that the total on the counter was equal to the total number of reviews accepted onto their system for publication. We therefore considered that there was no evidence to suggest that GGS were moderating out negative reviews for reasons other than to verify compliance with their user policy, and we therefore concluded the claims in the ad about the feedback received were not misleading.

We investigated the ad under CAP Code (Edition 12) rules  3.1 3.1 Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so.  and  3.3 3.3 Marketing communications must not mislead the consumer by omitting material information. They must not mislead by hiding material information or presenting it in an unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely manner.
Material information is information that the consumer needs to make informed decisions in relation to a product. Whether the omission or presentation of material information is likely to mislead the consumer depends on the context, the medium and, if the medium of the marketing communication is constrained by time or space, the measures that the marketer takes to make that information available to the consumer by other means.
 (Misleading Advertising),  3.7 3.7 Before distributing or submitting a marketing communication for publication, marketers must hold documentary evidence to prove claims that consumers are likely to regard as objective and that are capable of objective substantiation. The ASA may regard claims as misleading in the absence of adequate substantiation.  (Substantiation) and  3.11 3.11 Marketing communications must not mislead consumers by exaggerating the capability or performance of a product.  (Exaggeration), but did not find it in breach.

Action

No further action required.

CAP Code (Edition 12)

3.1     3.11     3.3     3.7    


More on