Books

Misleading Marketing Communication. Using the case of food labelling, this book demonstrates that the line between fair and potentially misleading communication can be approached in empirical terms, supplementing the predominantly political and legal deliberations that determine how society deals with these issues.

By first critically reviewing the legal conception of misleading commercial practices manifest in EU law, the authors discuss whether and how it can be transposed into empirically measurable terms. Presenting four complementary experimental studies targeting recurrent grey-zone scenarios on the Danish food market, the book illustrates the potential of the so-called ShopTrip test paradigm which simulates and registers real-life e-shopping behaviour as it unfolds while yielding new types of data against which opposing assessments of potential misleadingness can be matched. The results are discussed in the light of possible paths of theoretical explanation and implications for future regulative practices, including companies’ self-regulation.

Naming and Framing. This book offers an innovative, unified theoretical model for better understanding the processes underpinning naming and framing and the power that words exert over human minds.

The volume integrates theoretical paradigms and empirical insights from across a broad array of research disciplines, several of which have not been combined before, and uses this foundation as a point of departure for introducing its four-layered model of distinct but connected levels of analysis. Bringing together insights from cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics together with multimodal perspectives, Smith establishes new cross-disciplinary links, further integrating work from neighbouring fields such as marketing, health communication, and political communication, that indicate paths for future research and implications for communicative ethics.

Fair Speak on food packaging provides a range of science-based recommendations on how fairness-conscious food producers and their packaging designers best may achieve guidance of consumers rather than misleading them through choice of words, text, numbers, brands and images on packaging.

The problem is often perceived as legal, i.e. as a matter of respecting some rules. However, there is a growing awareness that the border between neutral information to consumers, fair sales talk and conscious or unconscious deception is not always self-evident, and that the assessment has more to do with language, concept formation, psychology, perception and sensory experience than with law.

Honest communication through innovative design of packaging for new food products (2008-2009) is the name of FairSpeak's one-year subproject, which particularly focuses on how the workflow between company and agency proceeds, and with which linguistic means of expression, ideas are presented and discussed, when products are named and claim is made, and their packaging design developed. What happens from idea to the product launch? How should the packaging of new innovative products communicate as for consumers to avoid being misled?

FairSpeak: Scenarios of consumers being misled on the Danish market for food products presents a mapping of scenarios where customers are misled in Danish administrative practice in the period 2002-2007 and an integrated analysis of the underlying hierarki of problems from a theoretical as well as practice-oriented perspective. The book includes an alphabetical list of basic elements used on food labels.

Reports

Books by or with participation of members from the Fair Speak Group (selection)

Møgelvang-Hansen, Peter; Riis, Thomas; Trzaskowski, Jan (2022). Markedsføringsretten. 4 edt., ExTuto Publishing, København.

Trzaskowski, Jan (2018). Behavioural Innovations in Marketing Law. In: Micklitz, Hans; Sibony, Anne-Lise; Esposito, Fabrizio (eds), Handbook of Research Methods in Consumer Law (Edward Elgar Handbook series on research methods in law), pp. 296–333.

Trzaskowski, Jan (2018). Identifying the Commercial Nature of “Influencer Marketing” on the Internet. Scandinavian Studies in Law, Volume 65 (‘50 Years of Law and IT’), pp. 81–100.

Trzaskowski, Jan (2017). Interpretation and Assessment under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive — the ICC Code for Advertising and Marketing and the Commission’s Staff Working Document. In: Ulf Bernitz & Caroline Heide-Jørgensen, Marketing and Advertising Law in a Process of Harmonization. Hart Publishing,  pp 85–103.

Møgelvang-Hansen, Peter; Riis, Thomas; Trzaskowski, Jan (2011). Markedsføringsretten 2 edt., ExTuto Publishing, København.

Møgelvang-Hansen, Peter; Riis, Thomas; Trzaskowski, Jan; Andersen, Marie Pade (2011). Oversættelse af ICC’s Kodeks for Reklame og Markedskommunikation, ExTuto Publishing, Copenhagen.