In general, there are seven different types of advertising recognized by business ethicists. The first is pure informational advertising. Such advertising merely conveys straightforward information about the product that it is being used to promote. For example, if the product in question is a certain type of car, such advertising will present factual information about the car in question, such as its top speed, its costs, and its safety rating. The second type of advertising is deceptive advertising. Such advertising presents information about the product that it is promoting as though it were true information, when, in fact, the advertiser believes the information to be false. For example, were a certain brand of cigarettes to be advertised as being good for its smokers’ health when the advertiser believed that smoking it was in fact harmful, such advertising would be deceptive advertising. (It is important to note here that for an advertisement to be a deceptive advertisement, the advertiser need not know that he is providing his consumer audience with false information. Instead, he need only believe this to be the case.) The third type of advertising that is possible is that termed “puffery.”
Such advertising consists of hyperbolic promotional claims about the product advertised. For example, a hamburger chain might indicate in its advertisements that its staff are so customer-friendly that even its CEO cooks hamburgers there and interacts with the consumers, or the advertiser of a certain brand of soda might indicate through its promotional material that its soda is so tasty that even polar bears enjoy it. The fourth type of advertising is bombardment, or name recognition advertising. Here, advertisers attempt to expose as many consumers as possible to their advertisements for a particular product for as long as possible.
The aim of such advertising is to establish in consumers’ minds that if they require a certain product, then they should buy the advertised brand of that product. This aim is achieved through advertising bombardment by establishing in the consumers’ minds a link between the purchase of a certain type of product and the purchase of a certain brand of that product. This type of advertising is often termed “name recognition” advertising. The fifth type of advertising is misleading advertising. Here, an advertiser does not actually present any information to the consumer that he believes to be false. However, he does attempt to mislead the consumer without doing so. For example, an advertiser promoting a certain type of car might mislead consumers into thinking that its performance is better than it is by claiming, correctly, that it had the best performance in its rally class, without noting that its performance was such that its rally class consisted solely of that type of car. The sixth type of advertising is associational advertising. When an advertiser uses this type of advertisement, it attempts to associate the product it is selling with certain nonmarket goods, such as happiness or sex appeal. For example, an advertiser promoting a certain brand of beer might attempt to associate the consumption of that beer with an enhanced attractiveness to the opposite sex. The final type of advertising that is widely recognized by business ethicists is so-called coercive advertising. Coercive advertising is advertising that the consumer cannot avoid. For example, the use of advertising inside public transit vehicles is held by some business ethicists to be coercive insofar as the persons inside such vehicles cannot avoid looking at it; they are thus coerced into viewing it.