Announcement regarding Frost & Sullivan’s Policy Guidelines for Implementing the “Guidelines for Enforcement of Advertising Citation Content”
Recently, Frost & Sullivan has observed that the General Office of the State Administration for Market Regulation has issued relevant notices to strengthen the supervision of suggestive terms in advertising. Subsequently, an announcement was made regarding the “Guidelines for Enforcement of Advertising Citation Content” (referred to as the Guidelines). Frost & Sullivan promptly organized its internal compliance team to carefully study the specific policy points of the Guidelines at the moment of their release. In addition, comprehensive notifications and risk warnings were provided to all related clients of Frost & Sullivan regarding the possible details related to Frost & Sullivan’s market position statement services, in order to prevent clients from improperly applying past research findings to various advertising citation scenarios.
Over the past few years, during interactions with brand owners through market research services, Frost & Sullivan has gradually realized that traditional advertising creative forms cannot meet the increasing needs of brand owners. Brand owners urgently need to establish a unified brand recognition framework for their target audiences from a trustworthy, compliant, and reusable perspective. This demand has directly led to the emergence of the third-party consulting company market position statement as a new research service model. When conducting such research, Frost & Sullivan always adheres to professional research standards. In the complete reports and market position statement documents, pre-defined conditions such as statistical criteria, applicable time, sample scope, and data limitations are clearly indicated. The research conclusions also have strict application boundaries, and the original research is not suitable for direct use as a marketing slogan by brand owners.
HoweverFrost & Sullivanhas found that some brand owners, when conducting advertising campaigns, extract favorable conclusions from reports in isolation, omit all or part of the underlying constraints, and remove the statistical boundaries. They simplify and transform a professionally conducted research conclusion into a marketing advertisement slogan for public dissemination, resulting in misleading advertising effects.
To prevent the misuse of research results from misleading consumers,nowofficiallyreleasedthe following statement:
Frost & Sullivan will completely ceaseresearchconclusions containing absolute advertising terms in market position statement services within the Chinese market. At the same time, a comprehensive review of the usage of historical research conclusions will be carried out, and relevant brand owners are required to immediately stop using historical research outputs that have exceeded the authorized period or do not meet the new advertising regulatory requirements. Frost & Sullivan will strictly comply with the policy requirements of the “Guidelines for Enforcement of Advertising Citation Content” and firmly oppose the abuse or misuse of serious industry research results.
As a professional industry research institution, Frost & Sullivan is committed to building a trustworthy and compliant research ecosystem and delivering more research-based and meaningful products to society. Frost & Sullivan will also actively explore more scientific, rigorous, transparent, traceable, and verifiable research methodologies to convey more objective and neutral market research outcomes to the public.
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