The Logical Fallacies and Think Better sections of this book cover nearly 100 “do’s” and “don’ts” on how to be a better critical thinker. After finishing the draft of the book, even the authors wondered, “How am I going to remember all this stuff?” We offer three tips: (1) use the critical thinking checklist provided below, (2) take slightly more time to construct your marketing arguments on a day-to-day basis, and (3) continue your learning by checking out the suggested critical thinking resources in the next chapter.
The Critical Thinking Checklist
Photocopy and cutout for easy reference!
Critical Thinking Checklist for Marketing Arguments
Are your premises understandable (e.g., clear sentences, defined terms)?
Do you have good evidence for each premise?
Are your argument’s premises true or plausible to your audience?
Are your premises logically linked to your conclusion?
Do your premises have implied premises that should be made explicit to make your argument more persuasive? Repeat #1–4 for each implied premise that you’ve made explicit.
Is your conclusion understandable and believable?
Are Your Premises Understandable?
A number of logical fallacies address this issue directly or indirectly—Argument by Gibberish, Ambiguity Fallacy, and Lying with Statistics—as does the Think Better piece, “What is a Concept?” Avoiding jargon, using the same definition for a word or phrase consistently, and avoiding vague or ambiguous language, will take you a long way in constructing understandable premises for your marketing arguments.
Do You Have Good Evidence for Your Premises?
What constitutes “good” evidence? First let’s define evidence: That which is used to support an argument. “Good” evidence, therefore, is support that helps persuade your audience. Good evidence is:
Relevant: The support is pertinent to the argument’s conclusion. Marketing research can provide relevant support to an argument for increasing a product’s price; “gut feel” does not. Also, avoid hearsay; it may be interesting, but hearsay is not good evidence.
Verifiable: Can the evidence be substantiated by your audience? Not that anyone will want to take the time to do this, but knowing that one can substantiate a claim adds credence to your evidence. Also, it’s a way of double-checking yourself.
Sufficient: Assess sufficiency from two perspectives. First, have you covered all relevant topics? For example, if you are arguing to expand the sales force, some relevant topics to cover might focus on appropriate measures of sales force workload, sales potential forecasts, and sales force effectiveness.1 Second, has each topic been covered at a sufficient depth? For example, if you are making an argument to improve product quality, have you defined all the dimensions of product quality (e.g., durability, reliability, product life) and made clear which aspects of product quality you are recommending to improve?
Accurate: Accuracy is the extent to which a statement faithfully reflects some aspect of the world. If you make the argument, say, to expand digital media expenditures, and as part of your argument, you claim that all of your competitors use digital media, is that claim accurate—is it truly 100 percent, or is it more like 90 percent or 80 percent?
As discussed in the Think Better piece, “Marketing Arguments,” good critical thinking does not demand that premises be true with a capital “T,” but they do need to be as accurate as is possible and plausible to your audience.
Accuracy is related to trustworthiness. Your audience will not believe in the accuracy of your source if they don’t trust it, no matter that your source may have used advanced or “scientific” methods to generate the evidence you’re using (e.g., see The Ludic fallacy and Lying with Statistics).
Are Your Premises True or Plausible to Your Audience?
To discover any credibility gaps in advance, try out your argument on a friend or colleague before making a formal presentation.
For example, senior sales managers in a large chemical manufacturer were initially skeptical of certain marketing research finding. The credibility of the research was significantly enhanced when the investigator explained how respondents were properly screened in the survey process. Management needed to be made comfortable that the research interviewed the proper decision makers in the firms interviewed.
Are Your Premises Logically Linked to Your Conclusion?
Recall that the Non Sequitur fallacy (literal meaning, “does not follow”) addresses this weakness in arguments, which, after reading this book, you are not likely to use. Rather, the goal here is to make your arguments as strong as possible. Recollect that the definition of a strong inductive argument is: If the premises are true, the conclusion is highly likely. So ask yourself, “How can I make my argument stronger?”
There are various ways to do this. For example, are your premises sufficient—both in the number of relevant issues covered and also the depth to which each is developed? For example, in making an argument to expand a product line, some of your premises might examine issues such as trial, repeat volume, and market penetration of brands in the current product portfolio. You might be able to strengthen your argument further by addressing additional measures of product portfolio performance such as year-on-year growth, cannibalization rates, and various brand equity metrics.
Do Your Premises Have Implied Premises That Should Be Identified to Make Your Argument More Persuasive?
Watch out for this one! All premises have, in varying degrees, unstated premises that can go on forever. Stop when you have grounds to believe that the premise you’re developing has been sufficiently flushed out to be plausible for your audience. Consider Figure 15.1.
In the first example (middle column), claiming that “annual sales will continue to grow by 7 percent” implies that “what occurred in the past will continue in the future.” The implied premise incorporates David Hume’s “problem of induction,” discussed in the Think Better piece, “David Hume.”
Figure 15.1 Stated and implied premises
It’s best in this case to give some justification for this implied premise. One way is to note that the company’s growth rate is affected by the overall economy and that there is a strong statistical relationship between the company’s growth rate and gross national product (GNP). Then refer to a reliable economic forecasting source’s projections of GNP (for our U.S. readers, this is the Federal Reserve Bank).
In the second example, the premise “moderate to light users account for 40 percent of our sales” is evidence used to support the conclusion that the firm needs to “advertise to all prospects, not just ‘heavy’ users.” The implied premise here is that the time period used to create the heavy, moderate, and light user groups is appropriate for this argument. One can affect the percentage of moderate and light users in a given market simply by shortening the time frame to create the categories. For example, the percentage of light users in a given category increases as the time frame increases. The appropriate time frame is a function of how often, on average, consumers purchase a product. Therefore, demonstrate to your audience that the time frame to create these categories is appropriate (e.g., one year for most consumer packaged goods; maybe five years for certain industrial equipment goods).
You probably have recognized that the chain of implied premises can go on nearly forever. Where do you stop? In the first example, we suggest that a second premise that’s used to support the Example Premise might be:
We can expect annual sales growth to increase by 7% because, over the past 10 years, average GNP growth has been 3%, and our company’s growth, accounting for adding new stores, has always been 2.3 times GNP growth, and the Federal Reserve forecasts GNP growth over the next five years at 4%.
You might want to provide further evidence supporting the claim that company growth will continue to be 2.3 times GNP growth.
When do you stop supporting your premises? Clearly, one has to use judgment. Remember, a good argument will persuade your audience. Flush out as many implied premises you feel are necessary to make your argument strong and cogent to your audience.
Is Your Conclusion Understandable?
This is likely to become an issue if the conclusion is vague or ambiguous. For example, if your conclusion is, “We need to improve the quality of our products?” what does “quality” mean, what does “improve” mean?
Make sure your conclusion is reasonable, given the context of your industry. If your conclusion calls for an outcome that your industry has never experienced—for example, “Therefore we need to increase our sales force 300 percent over the next three months”—you’d better have very compelling premises and logic to support it.
Take More Time to Make Decisions
This may be the most difficult recommendation to incorporate into your day-to-day work schedule. Most of us are doing the job of at least one- and-a-half, if not two other people. And when the clock strikes 5:00 p.m. (or 1700 hours for our international and military readers), most of us would just rather be at home with our families. Nevertheless, we encourage you to try, for three reasons: (1) mistakes are time-consuming and expensive, (2) you’ll get more efficient at critical thinking over time, and (3) as you perfect your critical thinking skills over time, you can become a mentor to others.
Mistakes Waste Time and They Can Be Expensive
Often it takes more time to fix a mistake than it does to do a job right the first time. “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” 2 JCPenney provides the classic example:
By the turn of the New Year in 2012, JCPenney was struggling to stay afloat. The department store fought to stand out amongst competitors, so CEO Ron Johnson decided to take a new approach: to eliminate “sales” and “fake prices.” Instead, they would make everyday prices reflect what used to be sales prices, and they wouldn’t price items ending in 9 (for example, $7.99) but would use whole figures. It appears that customers preferred to feel like they were getting a bargain, because JCPenney’s revenue dropped 25% that year, and almost 20,000 employees had to be laid off.3
The bottom line: Over the long run, improving and using your critical thinking skills will save time. “A stitch in time saves nine.”
The “stitch in time” is simply the prompt sewing up of a small hole or tear in a piece of material, so saving the need for more stitching at a later date when the hole has become larger. Clearly the first users of this expression were referring to saving nine stitches.4
You Will Get More Efficient Over Time
One of the reasons we included 60 logical fallacies in our book is that by examining critical thinking from many different perspectives, you begin to develop a better feel, or “sixth sense” for when you’re tempted to use poor reasoning in an argument—or if you are the target of a logical fallacy. Make a game of it. Next time you listen to a politician (especially a politician), advertising on the radio or TV, or a colleague at work, keep your critical thinking antenna attuned to what you’re hearing. Just by being sensitive, you’ll find that, over time, identifying logical fallacies will become second nature. You’ll be able to assess others’ arguments, and make your own arguments quicker.
Become a Mentor to Others
Many readers are either in management or will enter management’s ranks in the future. As Virgin Atlantic’s Richard Branson said:
When talking about the importance of mentoring, the American author and businessman Zig Ziglar couldn’t have said it any better—“A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.” Ask any successful businessman and, if they are honest about it, they will almost certainly admit to having benefited from the advice of a mentor at some point along the way.5
We can think of no better way to mentor others than to help them improve their critical thinking skills. Help those in your team to learn how to think, as well as what to think!