The following appeared in a memo from the vice president of marketing at Dura-Sock, Inc."A recent study of our customers suggests that our company is wasting the money it spends on its patented Endure manufacturing process, which ensures that our socks ar

The business idea of creating a longer durability for a product seems like a great one in theory, but there are many factors that a company should take into account when trying to advertise the product to the masses. In the case of Dura-Sock though, the argument that the use of the Endure process should be discontinued is based on a lot of assumptions that, in reality, may not hold up to be significant.

The first assumption that the vice president of the company makes is generalizing all of his company’s customers because of a recent study. There is no mention of exactly how many people participated in the study, and whether the people who participated in it are even generalizable to the entire batch of customers that the company gets. Perhaps only twenty people participated in the study, and this may just be 20 people out of thousands of customers. If that was the case, then the argument’s generalization that its customers think the money is being wasted on the Endure process would be incorrect because there has not been a clear indication of what the general customer population thinks. Perhaps, the sample is not representative, and the people being surveyed and studied are in fact customers who like to buy socks often. Because of this, they find the new process a waste, and such a small number of people shouldn’t dictate what the average customer thinks.

The issue of how the company is wasting its money is also an assumption. Even if enough customers were studied so that many do think the company is wasting money, the argument also makes the assumption that the waste of money is due to people not caring about the durability of the Dura Sock. In reality, maybe enough people care about the process to make it worthwhile, but perhaps the company is investing more than needed on the process. Perhaps cutting down on the spending for the process would be the smartest thing, and cutting down to how much of the process is actually needed to make a profit. Making the assumption that because there is some waste of money that the whole process should be discontinued is a bold and extreme way of thinking. Knowing exactly how much is being wasted is what is important in this case.

Another assumption that the argument makes is, again, related to the sample of customers surveyed. The argument points out that customers surveyed in its largest market, northeastern cities, value the appearance and color availability the most. Although this is its largest market, perhaps it’s not enough to assume that there aren’t enough customers out there that value the long durability of the sock the most. If there was a sizeable amount of customers who value durability the longest, perhaps there is still a good profit to be made because of the new Endue process. Along with that, only because customers mentioned valuing the appearance and color availability the most does not mean that he durability is something many of them do not value a lot as well. Perhaps the combination of the color and appearance, along with their durability, is what makes the socks so popular in its largest market. Just like before as well, only because customers were surveyed does not mean that enough customers were surveyed to make a generalization of the whole population of customers. Perhaps only customers in two cities were surveyed, and perhaps they feel very differently about the socks than others. Perhaps only ten percent of the customers in this market were surveyed, not even taking into account the entire batch of customers outside of the market. Generalizability and representation come into focus once again as huge assumptions made.

There are quite a lot of assumptions made in this argument, and if all of these assumptions turned out to be erroneous, then it would diminish the profit that the company could actually make with the Endure process. The sample size, how representative the sample is, and not assuming exactly how its customers feel about the durability is what is diminishing the argument.