ASA ruling on high street department store

This Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld a complaint that John Lewis plc had breached the CAP code by publishing two misleading advertisements.

The first advert was a paid-for Facebook ad for a MacBook Air featuring on-screen text stating ‘All thin, all fast. MacBook Air. For less. MacBook Air with M2 from £699. Price includes £150 saving. While stocks last’. The second advert featured a video of an ASUS Zenbook with the text ‘BLACK FRIDAY […] Knowing it’s price matched […] Save £450 on ASUS Zenbook A14 Copilot+ PC’.

In their response John Lewis stated that the MacBook claim related to its previous price of £849 and referred to the price that it was sold at prior to its reduction. They claimed there were limited sales at the original price prior to the reduction, and immediately before that the product had been out of stock. With regard to the ASUS Zenbook, John Lewis stated that the price of the product was reduced from £1,099 to £649 on the day the ad was published. Prior to this, they had sold several units at £1,099 but did not wish to disclose the exact amount of product sold.

ASA upheld the complaint on the basis that customers would understand ‘Price includes £150 saving’ to mean that they would achieve a genuine saving of £150 against the usual cost price. In the absence of specific data, ASA was not able to establish how long the product had been sold for £849. Although John Lewis could establish that they sold the ASUS Zenbook at £1,099 for 7 weeks prior to the price decrease, ASA required at least 3 weeks pricing history to assess whether this was the representative price.