Puffery is a concept that purports to be about things consumers ignore and don’t rely on. It is in fact a concept about things courts ignore and won’t rule on. At the moment, marketing and other empirical work has essentially nothing to say about puffery in the courts; puffery consists of precisely the elements of advertising for which courts neither require nor allow empirical evidence of consumer reaction.1 That doesn’t make the doctrine wrong, but it does mean that explanations for the doctrine should not be founded on unsupported, mostly unsupportable judicial assertions about how consumers think and what advertising claims they disregard. Instead, this chapter will argue, puffery should be about what kinds of advertising claims are too difficult to evaluate for their truth in judicial settings. That’s an epistemological determination that judges are actually well qualified to make, unlike the idea that consumers don’t rely on puffery.

Autonomy is the concept of self-rule, or the ability to control our personal choices. This chapter starts with a discussion of the dubious practice of selling herbal weight-loss products and asks whether regulations should try to protect consumers from making bad choices or if buyers should be solely in control of their own decisions. Advertising can be a challenge to autonomy, especially if it misleads or manipulates by triggering unreflective psychological dynamics, and capitalism relies on consumers being informed and able to make voluntary choices. The challenges posed by internet commerce are also discussed. The morality of workplace restrictions on individuals is examined, as well as the challenges of intrusive psychological testing and reduced barriers between professional and private lives. Whistleblowing is also introduced as emblematic of the tension between individual values and loyalty to a company. The concluding case examines the Wells Fargo banking scandal where customers were unaware of accounts opened in their name and the firm coerced employees to act against their best moral judgment.

It is hard to reconcile the research university’s supposed reason for being – the reasoned pursuit of knowledge – with its methods for building brand awareness and equity. Just like pitches for other luxury goods, the selling of higher education depends on irrational appeals devoid of information and marketing missives meant to hug the line between legally protected puffery and outright fraud. Although universities have always borrowed from the selling strategies of the commercial sphere, in recent years, there has been a sea change in the prevalence and degree of less-than-truthful content in higher educational self-promotion. How do university constituents – administrators, professors, students – interpret this gap between their institutions’ traditionally understood role and the logic of today’s academic branding strategies? The chapter chronicles the main rationalizations these actors deploy to reduce the tension between academic mission and academic marketing. By telling themselves that their school’s advertising efforts can be quarantined from the university’s larger purpose or actually provide tangible and truthful information to outside audiences or are a necessary evil, university constituents reduce their internal dissonance but fail to confront the realities of academic branding.