NARB Decision Holds Lessons For Claim Substantiation

NARB recently announced a decision in a case involving various claims that Shark Ninja made in an infomercial for its Shark Stratos Powered Lift-Away vacuum cleaner, including claims about how well the vacuum picks up hair and how well it reduces odors. The decision covers a lot of ground - Dyson challenged six express claims and nine implied claims - but we're just going to focus on a few issues that come up regularly in our conversations with clients about claim substantiation.

Best Hair Pickup Claims

Shark advertised that the Stratos vacuum offered "the best hair pickup of any upright vacuum in America." There are a lot of upright vacuums in America, so a threshold question is how many vacuums need to be included in test to support this type of claim. The general rule is that if an advertiser makes an unqualified claim against an entire category of products, it must test against 85% of that category. Shark argued that the "85% rule" is a flexible standard that