Looking for feedback on Argument analysis.

[mbudanova03]

Analysis of the argument Essay
"Your vacation resort can ill afford not to publicize its offerings on Travelshack,com". Our readership has more than doubled in the past year alone and is dominated by savvy consumers with large disposable incomes. Witness the experience of Snowbert Ski Lodge. Since it began advertising itself on our website a year ago, it is regularly booked to capacity and its annual profits have increased more than threefold from the previous year".

RESPONSE: First, the author suggests that companies will advertise their services in the online magazine due to the fact that the readership of the catalogue has doubled in the past year and most of the readers are consumers with large disposable incomes. The argument has at best poor reasoning as it is not clear how the readership has been measured and if the only fact that the number of reader increased can influence the sales of the particular company. Perhaps, the readership is measured by the number of subscriptions for this magazine. But we cannot be sure that once registered, the user will come back to this magazine or more over will buy a vacation package from this catalogue. Perhaps, he or she just registered to compare deals of this catalogue with the deals from the other catalogue and this user may not come back if the price in the other catalogue are less. So, we cannot be sure that readership status can influence the bargaining power of this catalogue. Hence, advertising in this catalogue may not bring any advantages to the company. Moreover, we do not know the reputation of this catalogue. Perhaps, it attracted the reader by the discounts but in fact never gave this discounts and the readers would never come back to this catalogue. Moreover, after such an incident buyers will not trust any longer the companies advertised in this online magazine.
Second, the author supports his assumption about benefits of advertising in the magazine by the fact that the company Snowbert Ski Lodge has increased its booking capacity and annual profits by more than three times due to the fact that they have advertised their resort in the online magazine. This assumption seems to be unrepresentative due to the fact that we cannot conclude that all companies will benefit from advertising in the online magazine based on one particular case. Such a success of the Snowbert Ski Lodge could have been the results of good management or the change in management stuff in the past year, or new marketing strategy, or renovation of the lodge, or lower prices in the past year compared to competitors. Annual profits could have risen due to many factors and without additional information we cannot rely on this assumption. Even if we rely on the assumption and say that the company's profits have risen due to advertising in the online catalogue, one example of such a success cannot be representative for the whole industry or for many firms. Next, we cannot rely on one company example and in order to better evaluate the argument we need to know more information about how the other companies advertised in the catalogue did during the last year and generally the trends in the market for the last year would help to strengthen or weaken the argument. Without this information the argument is not representative.
In conclusion, as stated above we can heavily rely on the argument drawn by the online magazine. The reasons the online magazine brings to support its argument in order to attract new customers has poor reasoning and lacks the necessary information which is needed to better evaluate the potential benefit from advertising in this magazine. If I were the marketing manager of a tourism company, I would not trust such unwarranted assumptions about potential benefits of advertising in this magazine and I would find the other magazine that could provide better reasoning supported by the facts.

[StaceyKoprince]

Hi, thanks for posting your essays! Just an FYI that instructors don't grade or give feedback on essays (see the forum guidelines for details).

But I certainly hope other community members respond. Also, if you're in our class, you'll have an opportunity to get essays graded and get written feedback during the course (after class 6). Finally, you can get essays graded by GMAT Write (the official essay grading service from the makers of the exam) - they'll both grade the essays and provide feedback as to how to improve (for a fee). For details and pricing, go to www.mba.com and search for GMAT Write.