Please rate - suggest improvements?
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03 May 2016, 18:25
The following appeared in a memorandum from the director of marketing for a pharmaceutical company:
“According to a survey of 5,000 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.”
The director of marketing at the pharmaceutical company claims that his company should market their new pain remedy to graduate students and to people with graduate degrees. Furthermore, he suggests that the company should concentrate on advertising in professional journals rather than in interest magazines. His claim is based on a survey of urban residents that suggests that stress headaches occur most often among people with graduate level degree. Stated in this way the director’s argument fails to mention several key factors on the basis of which the marketing team could evaluate the benefits of the marketing strategy that the he recommends. The conclusion of the arguments relies on assumption for which there is no clear evidence. Hence, the argument is unconvincing and has several flaws.
Firstly the director readily assumes that people with stress headaches look for pain medication for relief. This is clearly a stretch and the director fails to substantiate it. For example, there are several other ways to manage stress - Yoga, Physical Exercise, Jogging. Furthermore, there are other ways to manage stress through relaxing activities such as reading books etc. The director fails to address these alternates and how their marketing strategy should incorporate this. The argument could have been made much better if the director had provided some information about the statistics related to such alternate methods.
Second, the director claims that advertising in professional journals rather than in general interest magazines is a better strategy for marketing their new pain remedy. This is again weak and unsupported claim as the argument does demonstrate the correlation between professional journals and people with higher education. The assumption that people with higher education often read professional journals and not interest magazines is baseless and thus flawed. In fact, graduate students and people with higher degrees often tend to read interest magazines as a way to manage stress. If the argument and provided evidence that in fact higher education people tend to read more professional journals then the argument would have been a lot more convincing.
Finally, the director wants to focus the company’s new pain remedy only for stress headaches. In his argument there is no indication whether the pain remedy is only good for stress headache or does it help in pain relief in general. If it is the latter, the director’s plan for the new remedy is flawed in that he is narrowing the focus on a small market, whereas the medicine could be marketed as a pain reliever rather than stress headache reliever. The director has also failed to mention anything about existing companies in the market today. Perhaps people with stress headaches already have a medicine they prefer. The argument would have been better if the director would have given some evidence of the new pain remedy’s advantage over the company’s competitors.
In conclusion, the director’s argument is flawed for the above mentioned reasons and is therefor unconvincing. It could be considerably strengthened if the director clearly mentioned all the relevant facts. In order to assess the merits of a certain marketing strategy, it is essential to have full knowledge of all contributing factors.