Advertising the reduced price of selected grocery items in the Daily

“Advertising the reduced price of selected grocery items in the Daily Gazette will help you increase your sales. Consider the results of a study conducted last month. Thirty sale items from a store in downtown Marston were advertised in the Gazette for four days. Each time one or more of the 30 items was purchased, clerks asked whether the shopper had read the ad. Two-thirds of the 200 shoppers asked answered in the affirmative. Furthermore, more than half the customers who answered in the affirmative spent over $100 at the store.”

Discuss how well reasoned... etc.

The argument that advertising the reduced price of selected grocery items in the Daily Gazette will help you increase your sales omits some important concerns that must be addressed to substantiate the argument. The evidences cited in the argument present a distorted view of the situation and do not help in evaluating the argument. Therefore the argument is weak and has several flaws.

First, the argument claims that advertising the reduced price of selected grocery items in the Daily Gazette will help you increase your sales. This statement is a stretch and the evidence provided in support of this is that each time a shopper, who read the ad, purchased an item from the thirty advertised items. This alone does not prove that advertising the reduced price helped in increasing the sales. For example, advertisements could have been published during holidays or thanksgiving, when stores are already offering huge discounts, then advertising the reduced prices during that period cannot be considered as a contributing factor in promoting sales. Clearly, without mentioning the specific period during which advertising was conducted it is difficult to evaluate the claim of the argument.

Second, the argument omits sales of non-advertised items and does not consider their impact on overall sale. For instance people who spent over $100 could have spent large part of it on non-advertised items and not on advertised items. So without any information on sale of non-advertised items, it is difficult to correlate the impact of advertising with increase in sale. If the argument would have provided information on sale of non-advertised items it would a lot more convincing.

In conclusion, the argument is flawed for above mentioned reasons and hence unconvincing. It could be considerably strengthened if it included more relevant facts such as period during which advertising was conducted and sales of non-advertised items. In order to access the merits of certain situation it is important to have full knowledge of all contributing factors. In this particular case, without relevant information the argument remains unsubstantiated and open to debate.