The finest’, ‘the most delicious’, ‘the absolute best’. These are expressions you often see in advertisements. Advertisers are given a lot of leeway to use superlatives, but where does one draw the line between a manufacturer’s opinion and a literal claim of superior quality? That question was recently raised again in provisional relief proceedings between LG and TPV.

TPV has a licence from Philips to manufacture and sell Philips televisions. TPV lauds one of these televisions as being ‘The best OLED TV you can buy’. TPV showed an EISA designation in several of its advertisements. Each year, EISA (Expert Imaging and Sound Association) confers awards on the best electronics and had conferred the title of ‘best buy’ on that Philips TV. Its competitor, LG, found the slogan misleading and summonsed TPV to court. According to LG, the problem was that the Philips TV had been awarded the title of ‘best buy’, not ‘best product’. The difference between the two is that ‘best buy’ refers to value for money, while ‘best product’ refers to the quality of the product. The Provisional Relief Judge in Amsterdam held that this method of promotion was indeed misleading. The appearance of the EISA designation alongside the TPV slogan leads the average consumer to interpret the slogan as a literal claim of superiority. That literal claim is one that TPV can’t quite substantiate: Philips’ OLED TV may well be the ‘best buy’ but it is not, qualitatively speaking, ‘the best’.

Slogans like ‘the best’ are not always considered to be literal claims of superiority. Specifically, in several other advertisements, TPV used the slogan ‘The best OLED TV you can buy’ without displaying the designation. The court’s holding was different for those instances: TPV’s conduct fell within a grey area, but did not go so far as to constitute a literal claim of superiority. According to the court, such claims were not so clearly unacceptable that they merited an injunction in provisional relief proceedings. The lesson to be learned: whether the promotion of something as ‘the best’ constitutes a literal claim of superiority or is merely an exaggeration of the type acceptable in advertising depends on the context. Citing test results quickly transforms otherwise acceptable advertising lingo into a claim that must be substantiated with hard evidence.

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