Dear LPG,

Have you noticed how many times product advertisers start off by offering us, the public, the solution to a problem that was never really there in the first place.

Perhaps I am wrong but I recently saw a television advert featuring a vacuum cleaner.  The advertisement starts by telling us consumers that this latest version now comes with a precisely angled laser light which reveals invisible dust. (actually it does not say that, if you really watch the advert it just kind of infers it though).  The advert then goes on to give some more credible reasons why one should choose that model the next time yours goes wrong, but that first fact that we are given has to be the one that they hope will persuade us that this is the way to go.

My friend also saw the advert and told me that she was going to choose this model as a replacement for her ailing floor machine.  I did ask why and she told me that the light had to be a good thing. 

From what I could see the machine was as good as any other but I had to question the significance of this laser light.  Was it there because a laser light would help the user to see the invisible dirt better?   Surely if you take the cleaner over the floor it should pick up all dirt visible or invisible.  We older people are usually pretty short-sighted anyway and I would argue that it would be pretty difficult to see the so called invisible dirt even if it was visible from the distance needed when the average user is standing and pushing the machine around the floor.   So then I thought that perhaps the machine needed to see the dust before it could pick it up, but that got me wondering how the light would help it to see any dust in a way that it would manage to pick it up better.  Surely they are designed to pick up all dust.

And a light on the front of a vacuum cleaner is not a new idea.  I can remember our old Hoover from way back when I was a child having a light, although I don’t think that it was a laser one. 

Then I started to wonder about something I was told when I first heard the word laser.  I know that the light must point to the floor most of the time but taking a quick look on the internet allowed me to find an article or two on the subject of laser lights being quite bad for your eyes?

I don’t think that the cleaner is any worse or better than any other, and this for me is just one example of many where adverts try to blind us with science or other unrelated facts.  It’s a perfect example of how adverts influence us with lots of relatively irrelevant information…

But the lengths that advertisers will go to to put forward some pretty useless selling points never ceases to amaze even though they work.  They succeeded with my friend and I am not saying that she got a bad deal.  She is perfectly happy with her new purchase, but should we be looking at the facts in a bit more detail?

DE, Rushey Green.