Sorting Through the Seals of Confusion
So what if the mineral water bears the seal of the California Health Research Foundation, the computer boasts InfoWorld magazine’s Buyers Assurance Seal and the toilet paper carries a green seal, a green cross or three little arrows?
What does one learn?
“It tells me nothing,” says a Massachusetts housewife, “because I don’t know who they are or what they know.”
With all the seals available today, the “who” is more important than the immediate political or ideological appeal. “Seals are only as meaningful as the group behind them,” says Los Angeles lawyer George Schulman.
That group could be Good Housekeeping magazine--not everyone’s cup of tea, but more than 100 years old, a known quantity, setting its seal on advertisers. It could be the venerable Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council (the Green Seal), advocacy groups with known stances and firm supporters.
It could also be unknown and limited: Mendocino Beverage Co., which makes the mineral water, is the only company given the seal of the California Health Research Foundation, which works on alcohol and drug prevention for kids. It could be very casual, to put a gentle slant on the so-called Direct Mail Board of Review, which awards seals of honor to mail-order companies, and which is run (so they said) by two Pennsylvania industry consultants and their dog. And it could be very calculated, “a little group that gets together as the American Academy of Something and issues approvals just to exclude competitors,” says Schulman.
The particular judgment behind the endorsement may be equally unknown. The Direct Mail Board of Review gave its seal of honor to Keen Ear, a mail-order hearing aid company recently charged with false advertising and misrepresentation by California’s attorney general, simply because its ads seemed reasonable: The board doesn’t buy or see actual products, or check truthfulness.
There are no set criteria for the health foundation’s judging Mendocino Mineral Water best in its field. Criteria may also be arguable, as with the measures set--and heavily debated--for pesticide residues on grocery produce in the “NutriClean” certification program. Can consumers judge residue standards? Biodegradability? Recyclable fiber content?
Who, for that matter, knows the arrangements behind these approvals? Only Consumer Reports tells people, up front, that it is “not beholden to any commercial interest,” accepting neither advertising nor sample products. Perhaps only Consumer Reports can say that, since it sells only its information and only to the consumer.
Good Housekeeping doesn’t announce up front that its famous seal is, in a spokesman’s words, “an extension of the advertising policy”--available to any product approved for advertising, and signed up for at least two-thirds of a page of black-and-white space ($60,000) a year. And what is one to make of the Green Cross program, begun and promoted by four Western grocery chains, run by a company of which they are clients, and charged to the manufacturers from whom they buy goods?
Understandably, one can’t do good work without support: Even the environmental groups behind the upcoming Green Seal program will charge licensing fees. But there are complications, as the American Heart Assn. found last year when it announced plans to endorse processed foods that met certain criteria for salt, fat content and other ingredients. The plans were abandoned, opposed by business, regulators and consumer groups alike for content, approach, and the large fees that manufacturers would be charged for testing and advertising--fees that could have excluded small companies from the program.
Even if they get nothing else, groups awarding such seals get their own name in the public eye on product labels and in product advertising. This is certainly an advantage to sponsors promoting not just goodness and the common weal but their own product--Good Housekeeping magazine perhaps, or InfoWorld, a news weekly for corporate buyers of computer products.
Sometimes, even the consumer gets something beyond that guarantee of goodness. Good Housekeeping’s seal is actually a limited warranty, the magazine’s own guarantee to refund or replace certain advertised products that are found to be defective. (This guarantee, in fact, covers all its advertised products, not just those that spring for the seal.) InfoWorld requires all products which bear its Buyers Assurance Seal to offer a 60-day guarantee of repair, replacement or refund.
One can learn a lot, but not from the seals themselves. The only people who learn from them are people who already know both the endorsing group and their endorsement criteria. What seals give is not information but summation, the equivalent of a sound bite or a slogan.
By encouraging consumers to make a quick selection without investigation or exercise of judgment, seals actually discourage addressing the issues that should be considered in buying the product, or any other such product. True consumer information, says Rhoda Karpatkin, executive director of Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, consists of “telling you how to shop, then evaluate the products on the marketplace. You, the consumer, (are) armed to make a wise choice.”
