Discuss how well reasoned you find below argument
“The potential of Big Boards to increase sales of your products can be seen from an experiment we conducted last year. We increased public awareness of the name of the current national women’s marathon champion by publishing her picture and her name on billboards in River City for a period of three months. Before this time, although the champion had just won her title and was receiving extensive national publicity, only five percent of 15,000 randomly surveyed residents of River City could correctly name the champion when shown her picture; after the three-month advertising experiment, 35 percent of respondents from a second survey could supply her name.”
Response:
The argument that the potential of Big Boards to increase sales of products based on a three-month billboard advertisement of an athlete personality is flawed.
First, the sale of product has been compared to the respondent’s recognition of the athlete. The argument assumes that what happened to the latter will also happen to the former without laying down evidence that such is the case. Since the subjects are different, there is a chance that the effect will also vary to which the argument did not address. Second, it also assumes that the increase in respondent’s recognition was solely because of the billboard. While this could be true, there could be some other factors that could affect the respondent’s recognition, such as other forms of advertisement. Third, the argument did not discuss how the 15,000 respondents is actually a representative sample of the population.
The argument could then be strengthened by showing how these two different subjects correlate with each other (i.e., whether billboards is actually an effective marketing strategy for both subjects), by clarifying what other forms of advertisement did the respondents consume and by discussing how the respondent is actually a representative sample. These are necessary to address the foregoing flaws. Otherwise the argument will remain flawed.
2 Nov, written in 22 minutes