The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the UK body that enforces competition law and consumer protection law. For anyone doing marketing, it is the regulator that decides whether your reviews, prices, urgency messages and online sales journeys treat customers fairly, and since April 2025 it can fine businesses directly when they do not.
How the CMA works
The CMA is a non-ministerial government department. It took over the work of the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission in 2014, and its work touches marketing in two ways.
Consumer protection
Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the CMA can investigate a suspected breach of consumer law, decide for itself whether the law has been broken and impose a penalty of up to 10% of global turnover. Before 6 April 2025 it generally had to take a business to court to get that result. It can also require a business to change its practices and to compensate customers. Trading Standards enforce the same law locally and still handle most cases involving small firms.
The CMA publishes guidance on how it reads the law, including on unfair commercial practices, fake and incentivised reviews, and price transparency, along with the Green Claims Code for environmental claims. Guidance is not law, but it tells you what the regulator will look for, and Trading Standards officers use it too.
Competition and digital markets
The same Act gave the CMA a regime for large technology firms with “strategic market status”. In October 2025 it designated Google’s general search and search advertising services, and at the time of writing (October 2026) it has consulted on conduct requirements covering fair ranking, the use of publishers’ content in AI answers and data portability. Those decisions shape the platforms UK businesses advertise and rank on, so they are worth following even if you will never deal with the CMA yourself.
Why it matters for a UK business
Most small businesses will never receive a letter from the CMA. The practices it targets, though, are everyday marketing tactics: countdown timers that reset, “only 2 left” messages that are not true, compulsory fees added at checkout (drip pricing), reviews written by staff or paid for without disclosure, and subscriptions that are easy to start and hard to cancel. The standards set in its large cases become the standards Trading Standards apply to everyone else, and customers and competitors increasingly know what to report.
There is a commercial side too. Tactics the CMA calls unfair tend to win a sale today and lose a customer, and a review, tomorrow. A clean pricing page and honest reviews are easier to defend and usually convert better over time.
Common mistakes
- Assuming consumer law only matters to large retailers and platforms.
- Showing a headline price that leaves out a booking fee, admin fee or other charge every customer must pay.
- Running urgency or scarcity claims that a script generates rather than real stock or deadlines.
- Offering discounts or prize draws for reviews without making the incentive clear, or only asking happy customers. See incentivised reviews for where the line sits.
- Treating CMA guidance as optional reading because it is “only guidance”.
How to act on it
Walk through your own buying journey as a customer would, from ad to confirmation page, and note every claim and every price shown. Check that the first price someone sees includes all compulsory charges, that any urgency message reflects something real, and that cancelling or unsubscribing is as easy as signing up.
Then look at how you collect reviews: who is asked, what they are offered and whether any review on your site or Google Business Profile could have been written by someone connected to the business. Keep a short record of what you checked and when. A digital marketing strategy and consulting engagement with me includes this kind of review of claims, pricing and review practices alongside the channel plan.