Kosei Pharmaceutical (Kobe City), which sells the nutritional supplements “Nobilin” and “Nobilin C,” had posted images of social media posts commissioned from third parties on its own website and elsewhere without clearly stating that they were advertisements. The Consumer Affairs Agency and the Fair Trade Commission determined that this constituted a violation of the Stealth Marketing Guidelines and, on June 29, issued an order for measures against the company under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations.
From the Consumer Affairs Agency’s news release
Examples of the problematic representations
The company recruited third parties, provided the two products free of charge, and asked them to post about them on social media. It excerpted the images from those posts and displayed them on its own website with captions such as “Also very popular on social media!” It displayed them in the same manner on the store pages it opened on Rakuten Market and Yahoo! Shopping.
The Consumer Affairs Agency pointed out that “the posts did not make clear that they had been commissioned by a company, making it difficult for consumers to identify them as advertisements.”
The Consumer Affairs Agency ordered Kosei Pharmaceutical to inform consumers of the facts of the violation, to communicate measures to prevent recurrence to its executives and employees, and not to use similar representations in the future.
Nobilin is a food product marketed as “a delicious nutritional balance during the growth period,” while Nobilin C is marketed as “delicious nutritional support for the smartphone generation.” They were sold on Rakuten Market as the “No. 1 product in the kids category.”
