To succeed financially, Zapped needs greater name recognition. It shou

Prompt: The following appeared as part of a business plan recommended by the new manager of a musical rock group called Zapped:

"To succeed financially, Zapped needs greater name recognition. It should therefore diversify its commercial enterprises. The rock group Zonked plays the same type of music that Zapped plays, but it is much better than Zapped because, in addition to its concert tours and four albums, Zonked has a series of posters, a line of clothing and accessories, and a contract with a major advertising agency to endorse a number of different products"

My Answer:
The argument given as a part of a business plan, recommended by the new manager of a musical rock group called Zapped, proposes that in order to succeed financially, Zapped needs to diversify its commercial enterprises. The stated argument is inconclusive because it does not provide any data related to Zapped to support its hypothesis. It also tends to manipulate facts to present a distorted view of the reality and is a leap of faith, reasoning without clear outcomes.In sum, argument could be improved if supported with relevant data on which its core assumptions depend upon.


First the argument assumes that the only way to succeed financially is through a greater name recognition. This statement is incorrect because there could be several other methods for Zapped to gain financial success. For example, the band could increase its current ticket pricing, organise more tours annually or often collaborate on tours with bands/ artists more popular than them. Thus, the argument would have been much clearer if it provided details about some issues like current revenues, percentage of the band’s fanbase who always attend the band’s concerts and the number of concerts held by the band annually, while making this claim.

Secondly, the argument claims that the only way for Zapped to succeed financially is through diversification of its commercial enterprises. This is again a weak and unsupported claim since the argument tries to prove its point by explicitly comparing Zapped with another band named Zonked just on the basis of their similarity in the type of music played. So unless the argument does not provide a clear picture on the differences or similarities in their fan count, ticket pricing, number of concert tours, it would be unwise to deem that financial success can only be achieved through commercial diversification. Further the idea of launching a series of posters and clothing line can turn out to be highly unprofitable for the band if it currently does not have a huge fan base that would, with some guarantee, purchase these products. Also a contract with a major advertising agency can backfire on the band if the advertisement fails to achieve its purpose. Therefore, if the argument provided some evidence of the reasons as to why Zonked has gained success using the proposed suggestions and why they would work on Zapped as well, it would have been more convincing.

Finally, the argument should answer some questions such as: What is the current revenue of both the bands mentioned? What is the expected revenue for Zapped? How many fans does Zapped currently have? How many tours does Zapped do in a year? What is the ticket pricing for both Zapped and Zonked's tours? Without convincingly answering these questions, one is left with the impression that the claim is more of a wishful thinking rather than a substantiative evidence.

In conclusion, the argument is flawed for the above mentioned reasoning and is therefore not convincing. It would be considerably stronger if it clearly mentioned the alternatives to diversification of commercial enterprises and why they would not be a good attempt to achieve financial success. In order to assess the merits of a decision it is necessary to have a full knowledge of the contributing factors. In this particular case it is the band’s overall revenues and the expected revenues, and also the fan base, number of tours held annually and the ticket pricing of these tours. Without this information the argument remains unsubstantiated and open to debate.

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Thank you in advance!

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