Online fashion retailer PrettyLittleThing has had its knuckles rapped by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for a series of promotional tweets it ran over the Black Friday period last year.
A series of 15 tweets were sent out from PrettyLittleThing’s X (formerly Twitter) account, between 23 and 28 November 2023, with similar ads posted across the brand’s other social media channels.
Offering customers discount codes which would give them 30%, 40%, 50% or 99% off their order, the tweets included one which stated ‘FUCKIT40’ several times, followed by the text; ‘Only 3 hours left to use this code before my boss finds out’.
The ASA challenged the series of promotional messages for being misleading or breaching the code on three separate counts.
It said that most of the tweets misleadingly implied that the promotions applied to all PrettyLittleThing products and that further discounts would not be available when the promotion ended. It also said the lack of closing dates or specific time period breached the advertising CAP code.
Subscribe to Marketing Beat for free
Sign up here to get the latest marketing news sent straight to your inbox each morning
In its defence, PrettyLittleThing said the Black Friday period was well-known to shoppers in the UK and that it was expected for businesses to offer promotions for the duration.
The retailer said its customers were “value-oriented” and the promotional messaging was designed to reflect that.
It also said it always tried to include significant conditions to promotions in ads – such as start and end dates – but space was limited, so it used asterisks to point to the relevant information where possible.
However, the ASA found that on some of the posted messages, the asterisks didn’t point to anything at all. On others, the qualifying information was printed in such a small font that the ASA believed “most consumers would overlook it”.
The ads also included headline claims referencing “everything” and “every single thing”, suggesting that the promotions included all products sold by PrettyLittleThing. This was not the case, and in the absence of express exclusions, the ASA considered that consumers would expect the promotions to include lines from across the whole range and concluded the ads were misleading.
Of particular note were tweets reading ‘FINAL40’ and ‘for one hour ONLY’, which (wrongly) suggested they would be the last in the series of promotions, pressuring consumers into making swift purchase decisions.
PrettyLittleThing was told the ads must not appear again in that form, and that future ads must make it clear which product lines are included in the promotion and how long the offers were running for.
