Upheld

The complainant said that when their grandmother responded to the ad she was told that the free home trial involved either visiting another home nearby that had a stairlift installed, or a van containing a chair visiting her home for her to try inside the vehicle. The ASA understood that some new members of staff were not aware of the free home trial as it was not requested often, but that Acorn had subsequently retrained all relevant staff. However, we noted that Acorn had provided an assurance to the ASA in 2009 that they would ensure free home trials were available, and were concerned that not all relevant staff were aware of them. Acorn provided order forms for two customers who had taken up the free home trial offer in the last three months. The order forms appeared to be standard forms filled in by sales agents when ordering a stairlift for a customer. Both forms showed that no deposit had been paid. However, they both showed a cost for the stairlift and described this as "what you now owe", and neither form referred to a free trial. Both forms were signed by the customer under the declaration "I agree to pay the amount I owe to the person fitting the stairlift". We considered that consumers would expect a free home trial to involve a trial of the product in their own home, without an obligation to purchase it. Whilst we acknowledged that Acorn said these customers were not obliged to pay for the product if they decided not to keep it, we did not consider that consumers would expect to have to sign a sales contract to access a free trial. We did not consider that Acorn had demonstrated that the free home trial was available to consumers at the time the ad appeared, or that the trial was genuinely a "free home trial" as consumers would understand it. We concluded the claim was misleading.

The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3 (Misleading advertising) and 3.7 (Substantiation).