Deceptive Marketing Practices

In my new edition of the trade magazine Health Supplement Retailer an article jumped out at me I would like to share with you. If you remember back to my post on why I choose the products to sell in my store, another reason for including or excluding a product is scientific sense. This means the product must have some type of genuine scientifically verifiable purpose. I see many products that claim to have some benefit but when I do the research all I find are animal (rat) studies. One such company that fits into the deceptive marketing practices model is the Garden of Life company.

Garden of Life first hit the health food scene with a splashy ad showing sickly individual who claimed to have been restored to health with the Garden of Life Primal Defense HSO product. When I saw this ad it did not make a whole lot of sense to me. HSO or homeostatic soil organisms have very little to do with human health. After doing a little research, I found that HSO's are considered to be toxic to humans. Hmmmm!! This caused alarms to go off, red flags started to wave and my spidy sense started to tingle.

For the last few years I have lost many sales because I refused to carry the Garden of Life products. It now seems my spidy sense was absolutely correct. The Federal Trade Commission brought suit and has extracted a settlement against Garden of Life for deceptive claims about the four top selling Garden of Life products including the Primal defense HSO product. The Garden of Life company agreed to stop making deceptive claims about the results of scientific studies that supposedly substantiate the marketing claims about their products.

The old saying, "IF IT IS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE..." applies here. Many people bought into the health claims of this company without doing their own due diligence. It is this type of company and the deceptive marketing they do that gives the entire health food and alternative medicine universe a black eye.

Thanks for spending a part of your day her with me,

James