Sun Pharma Revital H Woman ads misleading, inadequately substantiated: ASCI

New Delhi: Country's largest drugmaker, Sun Pharmaceuticals Ltd, (Sun Pharma) has been pulled up by the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) only account of advertising one of its popular brands in the OTC segment- Revital H Woman, in violation of ASCI Guidelines. The council committee found the company's claim for advertising the product to be misleading and inadequately substantiated.

This comes following the investigation done by ASCI which was conducted after the Consumer Complaints Council (CCC) of ASCI examined complaints against 334 advertisements. Out of these, 106 advertisers ensured prompt corrective action, while 190 ads out of 228 were evaluated by the council.

The committee noted that facts mentioned in the advertisements were misleading, exploit consumers' lack of knowledge and could lead to widespread disappointment in the minds of consumers.

Sun Pharma in its website states Revital H Women is a specially designed Vitamins & Minerals Supplement product for women.

The CCC noted that in the advertisement for the said product, the company claims "9/10 women felt energetic after using Revital H Woman". The claim is based on a study done by an independent body, the Home Tester Club. However, CCC observed it was misleading and inadequately substantiated.

The advertiser's claim "9/10 women felt energetic after using Revital H Woman" was misleading and inadequately substantiated. The CCC observed that this claim is based on a study done by an independent body, the Home Tester Club. It was noted that while the samples of the test product were couriered to 1000 sample respondents that met the eligibility criteria, there were only 604 members who completed the post-trial survey.

The CCC noted that only those with a favourable disposition were allowed to complete the survey

Further, CCC did not consider the design of the questionnaire to be acceptable or reliable to generate claim support data as only one product was used for the purpose of survey thus most likely creating bias in favour of the Product in the minds of participants/respondents of the survey.

"A comparative claim could have been a better approach. Most of the questions were "leading" which would elicit favourable answers for the Product. The advertiser picked only one answer instead of drawing an overall conclusion from the data for the claim,"

This was considered to be distorting the data in order to mislead the consumer by omitting the overall conclusion of the survey.

Last year, Sun Pharma signed Bollywood star Akshay Kumar as the new brand ambassador of Revital H.

Also Read: Akshay Kumar appointed as brand ambassador for Sun Pharma's Revital H