We hear versions of this question all the time: “But our competitor says it on their website…” And we completely understand why brands ask it. If you’ve spent half an hour looking at other supplement brands online and they’re all talking about products that “boost”, “fight”, “improve”, “protect” and “transform”, it’s reasonable to assume you can probably say something similar.
Unfortunately, regulatory compliance doesn’t work like that.
The supplement industry is incredibly competitive, and brands understandably want their marketing to stand out. The problem comes when exciting marketing language starts stretching beyond what the regulations actually allow.
For food supplements, health claims are tightly controlled. In Great Britain, you generally need to work within the permitted framework for nutrition and health claims, including the relevant authorised health claims and their conditions of use. And changing the wording slightly doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
For example, if an authorised claim says a nutrient “contributes to normal psychological function”, turning that into something much punchier about transforming your mental health could materially change its meaning. Similarly, words such as “boost”, “supercharge”, “fight” and “prevent” might make your copy considerably more exciting, but they can also push it into territory you really don’t want to be in.
Then there are medicinal claims. If your supplement starts claiming to treat, prevent or cure a disease or medical condition, you have a much bigger regulatory problem on your hands.
This is where brands can get caught out. You might find ten competitors making exactly the same claim. That doesn’t mean the claim has somehow become acceptable. It might simply mean nobody has challenged those adverts yet.
Regulatory enforcement isn’t necessarily instantaneous, and non-compliant marketing can exist in the wild for some time before it attracts attention. Copying it simply means inheriting someone else’s regulatory risk. Not ideal.
We always recommend considering claims much earlier in product development. Look at your ingredients, look at the authorised claims available for them and check whether your product meets the relevant conditions of use. Then build your marketing around what can genuinely be supported.
It’s also worth getting your regulatory and marketing teams talking to each other early. Compliance shouldn’t be the final hurdle your campaign has to jump over once everything has already been designed. When it’s considered from the beginning, there’s usually much more room to develop messaging that is both commercially interesting and compliant.
Because discovering that the headline you’ve built your entire campaign around can’t actually be used when you’ve already designed the packaging is considerably more painful.
At Taylored, we’re all for making regulatory compliance commercially workable. We just don’t recommend using your competitors as your regulatory department.
If you’re developing a supplement and want to understand exactly what you can and can’t say about it, that’s where we can help.
