Irrelevant Comparisons And The Pseudo-survey

By Author: Apple
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We tend to assume that the best seller is the best product. In-stead, the best seller may be inferior to another product but have better distribution, a big early lead in the market, or better advertising than its competitors. Yet advertisers capitalize on our best-seller-is-best assumption by telling us when a product is Cartier Roadster Replica outselling others of its type. Claims of this sort invite the audience to infer that the product's high quality accounts for its status as the best seller.

Irrelevant criteria are often applied to establish uniqueness. Because we have been taught that you get what you pay for, advertisers can persuade us that what is costlier is better. Of course, cost may reflect factors other than quality, including inefficient production techniques, high tariffs, high profit taking, or even a large advertising budget. Nonetheless, a product can be made to seem unique by having a higher price than its competitors. Thus, for example, Boodles gin is advertised as "the ultra-refined British gin that only the ...
... world's costliest methods could produce. Boodles. The world's costliest British gin." Note the qualifier. It is not the world's costliest gin but the costliest British gin. If we accept the assumption that costliness is next to godliness, perhaps we should scan the liquor store shelves to see whether there is a more expensive gin, British or not.

We live in a society impressed by the natural and social sciences and accustomed to trusting their authoritative, quantitative claims. Surveys appear regularly in the news media telling us how we plan to vote, what we think about specific issues, and whom we trust. By wrapping marketing claims in scientific language, by expressing claims in the style of valid surveys, and by placing actors in the settings we associate with the medical and scientific professions, advertisers increase the chance that we will mistakenly attach scientific validity to the claims they make.

When an ad claims that "four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum," it is using the familiar language of the survey report. A legitimate survey will disclose the population sampled (from what group were the dentists drawn-- all dentists in the United States, dentists in a single state, dentists in a certain association or at a certain meeting?), how the survey population was chosen (random sample?), the total number of dentists asked, and the error we can expect in generalizing from this sample to the whole population. But Omega Replica Watches the ad tells us only that four out of five dentists surveyed recommended a certain product for patients likely to engage in a certain activity. Conceivably, only five dentists were asked the question. Alternatively, the question may have been asked only of dentists already predisposed to the product. From the evidence offered in the ad, we simply don't know.

In addition, there is an important qualifier in the ad. Do the dentists who recommend sugarless gum for their gum-chewing patients recommend gum chewing? Per-haps the dentists would say, if asked, that gum chewing is unhealthy. Because the claim carries the qualifier "for their patients who chew gum," the dentists may not have recommended gum chewing at all. So we don't know how representative these dentists' views are, and we don't know whether they endorse gum chewing.