The Sofa King, a Northampton-based discount furniture retailer, has been blasted by the ad watchdog for causing widespread offence after running a campaign which used the strapline “Where the Prices are Sofa King Low”.
The company claimed to have used the slogan since it began trading nine years ago, and it was used on its premises and vehicles as well as in its advertising.
Bosses at the firm admitted that in 2004 Northamptonshire Police had tried to prosecute it but the case was not taken further by the Crown Prosecution Service and no complaints had been made direct to business.
The company said the slogan simply used its name to refer to pricing and that the words had not been changed or run together or punctuation used in a way that was intended to cause offence. It did not believe the slogan caused serious or widespread offence.
The Northampton Herald & Post said it had received two complaints about the slogan, but noted it also appeared on the advertiser’s shop front and on their vehicles, and so could be seen by the public at any time. The publisher said it had run the ad for some time with no complaints.
But the ASA believed the phrase “… Sofa King Low” could be interpreted as a derivative of the swear word “f**k”, which consumer research had found to be a word so likely to offend that it should not be used in ads at all, even when it was relevant to the name of a product. Because of that, it concluded that the slogan was likely to cause serious or widespread offence and must not appear again in its current form.
