The following is a memo from the marketing director of Lamfonz Pet Stores which operates thirty pet stores worldwide Five years ago our competitor Fish Emporium started advertising in Exotic Pets Monthly magazine Their sales overall have seen a steady inc

In memo from the marketing director of Lamfonz Pet stores, which operates thirty pet stores worldwide, it is stated that by placing their own ads in the popular pet magazines, they would be able to reverse the recent trend of declining sales and start making profit again. They have come to this conclusion based on the benefit (increase in sale 3-4%) received by another store – Fish Emporium. Although, the cited evidences seem logical and probable but, the assumptions on which the conclusion relies do not lend credible support to the argument, so before this recommendation can be properly evaluated, three questions must be answered.

First of all, are Lamfonz pet store and Fish Emporium store roughly comparable? In other words, can circumstances from one store be used to make generalization and prediction about the other? It is possible that two store are not similar at all – perhaps the Fish Emporium store may have different and unique varieties of pets available: hence, their overall sales must be greater. As well as, the ambience provided by this store must be better than the Lamfonz store and, as a result of which, the customers would be attracted to the Fish Emporium store. Moreover, they may provide extra discount, because of which people are more attracted toward this store. Further, the quality and service of stores are markedly different.

If either of these scenarios has merit, then conclusion drawn in the original argument is significantly undermined.

In addition to this, the number people who were interested to read newspaper five years ago, will it be same now? In simple terms, can we assume that there will be the equal number of people engaged in newspaper to acquire information and news. Moreover, it may happen that nowadays, people don't read magazines frequently: hence, there no point in placing the ads in magazines. Besides these all, there are many other open-handed technologies to be abreast about those ongoing activities around them, nowadays, available to people, due to which they may find the reading newspaper a tedious one and avoid them. If the above is true, then the argument does not hold water.

Lastly, were the total sales of two stores similar? Without knowing this critical fact, it is presumptuous to do comparison between two stores. Inspite, the overall sales of Lamfonz store may be greater than the another one. Therefore, it will be futile to compare the sales of these two stores. Also, the author predicts that since there is increase of 3-5 percent of sales of the Lamfonz stores, so there must be a considerable amount of profit: but percentage is a relative term. If the overall number of sales for the Lamfonz stores was just a few dollars, then a 3-5 percent increase cannot be considered as an effective increase in the number of sales. Hence, there is no evidence for the aforementioned question, which eventually weakens the author's claim.

In a conclusion, the argument, as it stands now, is considerably flawed due to its reliance on several unwarranted assumptions. If the author is able to answer the three questions above and offer more evidence (perhaps in the form of a systematic research study), then it will be possible to fully evaluate the validity of proposed recommendation to place ads on popular pet magazines in order to increase sales and profit.