I’ve recently realized that I should drink a lot more tea. My background is half Chinese and about a quarter British, so in some senses I feel like my heritage has created a “Bermuda triangle” of tea drinking. I was in the grocery store the other day picking out some teas to enjoy. I chose Tetley’s Orange Pekoe because it’s my British Grandma’s tea of choice, and that woman drinks more tea than anyone I’ve ever imagined (my best estimate puts her at approximately 10 cups daily).
As I was browsing the teas at my local Safeway, my eye was caught by this “Blueberry Slim Fast tea.” I’m not on a diet, but I was curious about this new fangled slim fast tea so I picked up the box to examine it further.
This tea claims to 1) Reduce appetite 2) Increase metabolism 3) Increase your energy. All in just 1 – 2 cups a day! Call me a skeptic but I have a very hard time believing that a tea bag could really produce these results for its customers. How could a tea producer make such outlandish claims?
It can make these claims because no one will ever be able to disprove it. Is someone going to do a controlled scientific experiment to examine the effects of Blueberry slim fast tea upon human metabolism? Of course not.
Thus, the tea maker is free to make any ridiculous claim they want, and people will probably believe it. In class we talk about consumers researching products and evaluating alternatives, but when it comes to products like “Slim Fast teas” there is no research to tell me if the Blueberry slim fast will actually help me trim a few inches off my waistline. There is no way for a consumer to substantiate or unsubstantiate their dubious appetite suppressing claims.
My point is that sometimes good advertising depends on what you can get away with. You could take a crappy blueberry tea, put a few leaves in there that are rumoured to reduce appetite, stick it in a fancy package, increase the price, name it “Blueberry slim fast” and then make any unsubstantiated claim you want about the tea’s “medicinal” or “weight loss” properties.
As consumers we have no choice but to take these advertisers at their word because there is no other information out there to tell us if stuff like this actually works or not. The producer knows more about their product than I, or anyone else, ever will, so I have no choice but to trust them (or not buy their product). It’s sad because information asymmetries like this allow lousy products to enter the marketplace, make dubious claims that can never be disproved, and take market share from products that might actually work.
