Could somebody please rate my essay and give me some feed back
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13 Oct 2015, 11:56
Question:
The following appeared in a memorandum from the director of marketing for a pharmaceutical company.
"According to a survey of 5000 urban residents, the prevalence of stress headaches increases with educational level, so that stress headaches occur most often among people with graduate-school degrees.It is well established that nationally, higher educational levels usually correspond with higher levels of income. Therefore, in marketing our new
pain remedy, 'Omnilixir', we should send free samples primarily to graduate students and to people with graduate degrees, and we should concentrate on advertising in professional journals rather than in general interest magazines."
Discuss how well reasoned...etc
My response
The argument presented in the memorandum is flawed on multiple grounds.It is based on too many questionable assumptions.
The case is built by presenting the result of a survey of 5000 urban residents. But it is not clear from the memorandum that this pain remedy is only for the urban market. What if it has applications on rural market?An argument based on a sample survey needs some information regarding the target population before we draw conclusions, to have a practical relevance for those conclusions. If the product has a market in rural areas also, then the conclusions drawn from this survey is not quite useful.
Next thing is about the potential use of this new pain remedy 'Omnilixir' - It is not stated anywhere in the passage that it is a specific remedy for stress-headaches. If that is explicitly conveyed then it would strengthen the argument as presented. Otherwise a recommendation to promote a generic product to a segmented audience is not logical.
The third assumption it makes is about the reading habits of people with graduate degrees. We don't have any data to conclude that a higher percentage of people with graduate degree or graduate degree students, read professional journals more than general magazines. Unless that data is available it is not a great idea to promote this product in journals alone even if the director wants to target his seemingly flawed segmented audience - people with graduate level eduation.
This argument is extremely weak because it tries to segment a market based on a specific use while the product seem to be a generic one. Secondly falsely assumes the reading habit of its target audience without any data support. Thirdly it draws conclusions out of a seemingly biased data set. Hence we need more data is those three directions to strenghten this argument.