False Advertisements Being Used to Draw In Customers

Nicole Mahdavi

nm410012@ohio.edu

With the increasing percentage of obesity rates in America, the focus of many fast food-chains over the past several years has been to try and make moves in a healthier direction or at least portray themselves as doing so.

 A recent example would be Mcdonald's and its recent addition of new salads to their menus as well as the addition of fruit smoothies. Although, Mcdonald's salad's are high in sugar and there probably isn't much fruit in the fruit smoothies, it would not be considered false advertisement on Mcdonalds part when trying to portray themselves as being healthy to consumers because the salads and fruit smoothies, meet the legal requirements to be considered a 'smoothie' or 'salad'. 

The issue really comes into play when companies such as KFC, try to position their 

menu as being health food and tries to trick consumers as being so.

 In an article titled, " KFC Could Learn Something About Itself and Marketing if It Listened to It's Consumers" it talks about when the Federal Trade Commission decided to take action against KFC and Pamela Harbour (one of the commissioners) spoke out and said, "KFC ... is fully aware of our nation's struggle with obesity, yet has cynically attempted to exploit a massive health problem through deceptive advertising. Companies should not be allowed to benefit monetarily from this kind of deception, especially where the health and safety of consumers are compromised."

In an effort to promote branding KFC as a healthy food chain, the company decided to pair up with Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, and donate 50 cents of profit from every pink bucket of chicken purchased. It doesn't make much sense for KFC to try and help ameliorate one health cause while totally going against another. KFC is helping those suffering from breast cancer while helping add to the already high obesity rates in America.

Taken from NYdaily.com

Taco bell is another case of false advertisement done by a fast food chain in hopes of making their food appear to be more appealing. In this case Taco bell was being sued for falsely advertising that their meat mixture, served in tacos, was  'ground beef', when in actuality only 35% of of the mixture contains meat.

A 2011 Huffington Post article titled, "Taco Bell Meat: Sued Over 35% Beef Content In 'Taco Meat Filling' stated that the reason Taco Bell could not advertise the meat filling as being ground beef was because, "The meat mixture sold..contains binders and extenders and does not meet the minimum requirements set by The U.S Department of Agriculture to be labeled as "beef", according to the legal complaint."

 It is completely unethical of these fast food chains to lie to the public about the products they are selling. Consumers need to know what it is that they are consuming, instead of being tricked by the false advertisements being put out there.