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more familiar word or phrase. Such confusion is likely to cause customer to misperceive or
miscomprehend the claim. Intra-attribute misleadingness refers to a situation in which a
claim about an attribute leads to misleading inferences about the same attribute.
Customers might generate two types of misleading intra-attribute inferences when exposed
to advertising or labeling claims.
Customers may rely on a claim for one attribute to infer a claim on another attribute. The
inference occurs because customers believe (rightly or wrongly) that the two attributes are
correlated. To the extent that the inferred claim is false, customers are misled.
Without effective qualification, customers may draw broad inferences from a claim based
on prior experience or on the physical appearance of the product (Hastak and Mazis, 2011)
Following Hattori and Higashida (2012), assume that customers are naive in the sense that
they always believe misinformation provided by the misleading advertising.
One may therefore assume that the European legislator founds its more recent legal
provisions on different concepts of the customers. Individual provisions are addressed to
different groups of customers with the aim of granting them specific protection. In this
context there are provisions which benefit all 3 groups of costumers, whilst there are also
provisions aimed exclusively at the protection or information of individual groups. Although
the target of the legal provisions cannot always be unequivocally ascertained, the provisions
can be attributed on the basis of their respective focus and objective (Meisterernst, 2013).
1) Casual Customer (concept of the confident and casual customer) information about food
legally required designation, designation customary on the market; Protected
geographical indications and designations of origin; Traffic light labelling system; Ban on
suggestion of existence of an ingredient; Labelling of meat; Legibility.
2) Empowered Customer (concept of the informed, reasonable and critical customer)
Descriptive designation; Mandatory warnings; Quid label; GDA labelling; Nutrition
labelling; List of ingredients; Labelling of refined oils and fats; Legibility
3) Vulnerable Customer (who are considered to need particular protection) Traffic light
labelling system; Replaced ingredient labelled on front in 75% height of name of the
product; Legibility. Customers who have to be considered particularly vulnerable, i.e.
“vulnerable consumers” mentioning characteristics such as “age, physical or mental
infirmity or credulity.”
Misleading advertising can benefit a company in the short run, it may cause a loss in the
long run (Hattori and Higashida, 2012). Such kind advertising will lead to decreasing trust in
the companies and their products (Tjiptono et al. 2014). In addition, distrust occurs when
customers learn advertisers have mislead them, and that this form of distrust has the power
to create persistent negative customer judgment towards a broad range of advertising
sources in the future (Darke et al., 2011).Indeed, customers have only limited information
processing abilities. Thus, in their role as customers who make choices, must distinguish
between the availability and process ability of information because information must be
available, easily processable and usefully.
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