Ad description
A product page for a set of pans on the Tefal website www.tefal.co.uk, seen on 5 February 2025, stated “£139.99 SAVE £190.01 Was: £330.00”. The ad featured images of the product with the superimposed text “RED HOT DEAL”. Underneath the images was further information, including an email icon next to the claim “SIGN UP FOR 15% OFF”. Clicking on the icon revealed a pop-up box with the text “Sign up for 15% off. That’s right… signup and SAVE, instantly! T&Cs apply, excludes Clearance. Minimum spend applies. Subscribe to our email Newsletter and receive 15% off your first purchase from the Tefal online shop”.
Issue
The complainant, who was unable to use the 15% discount offer against the advertised product, challenged whether the ad was misleading.
Response
Groupe SEB UK Ltd t/a Tefal stated that text in the pop-up box should have included a disclaimer which stated that “Red Hot Deals” were excluded from the 15% discount promotion. They said they had updated the text to read “T&Cs apply, excludes Red Hot Deals & Clearance offers”.
Tefal highlighted that “Red Hot Deals” were excluded from the 15% discount offer, and this was stated on their website’s landing page and in an email that consumers received upon sign-up.
During the ASA’s investigation, Tefal stated that they had removed the claim “15% off” from the product pages on their website and replaced it with the text “Subscribe for deals”.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA considered that consumers would understand the claim “SIGN UP FOR 15% OFF”, which was on the product page for a set of pans, to mean that if they signed up to Tefal, they would receive a 15% discount that could be used on that product. Whilst consumers might have expected there to have been some exclusions when using a discount offer, we considered the use of the claim on that page strongly implied that it could be used on the pans. We further considered the positioning of the “SIGN UP” icon directly underneath images of the product reinforced that impression.
However, we understood that the offer was not valid to be used on the pans because it was a “Red Hot Deal”, which was a separate promotion offered by Tefal. Because the 15% discount offer could not be applied, we considered the promotion should not have featured on the product pages for “Red Hot Deal” items. We acknowledged that Tefal said they would amend the pop-up box that appeared when the “SIGN UP” icon was clicked to state that “Red Hot Deals” were excluded from the discount offer. However, we considered that the discount offer itself should not have appeared if it could not be used against the advertised product, as this was likely to cause confusion.
We acknowledged that the “Red Hot Deals” landing page on the Tefal website featured the text “These deals are already too hot to handle… so discount codes are not valid for these products”. However, it was possible for consumers to have accessed the individual product page for the pans without viewing the “Red Hot Deals” landing page. We therefore considered that the inclusion of that information on the landing page was insufficient to override the impression created by the ad that the 15% discount offer could be used on the set of pans.
Because the ad suggested a 15% discount offer could have been applied to the advertised product when that was not the case, we concluded that the ad was misleading.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3 (Misleading advertising).
Action
The ad must not appear again in the form complained of. We told Groupe SEB UK Ltd t/a Tefal to ensure their ads did not imply that a discount offer could be used for particular products when that was not the case.
