LSAT 16 - Section 3 - Question 05

We’ve got a MSS question, which we can tell from the question stem: The statements above most strongly supports the conclusion that comparative advertisements

The stimulus begins with an common opinion of marketing experts about what a company should do in a nonexpanding market. Apparently the best strategy is to go after a bigger share of the market. This makes some sense; if the market as a whole (superset) isn’t expanding, then if an individual company (subset) wants to grow it should try to make up a larger portion of the market. According to these marketing experts, the best way to accomplish this is to run ads comparing your products to rivals and emphasizing their weaknesses. What this first sentence does is gives us a strategy for a specific situation, that of a company in a market that isn’t growing.

The first thing that you should notice in the next sentence is that we are talking about a stagnant market, the food oil market. Something is stagnant if it isn’t changing, so this market is exactly the type of nonexpanding one which the marketing experts strategy applies to. For two years the soybean oil and palm-oil did what marketing experts believe works; for two years they ran advertisements comparing products and emphasizing the bad health effects of each other. Contrary to the marketing experts’ belief, this strategy had little effect on the market shares of either side, and instead many consumers stopped buying edible oil (i.e food oil) at all. Instead of either company (subset) growing, their ads discouraged consumers from buying food oils, strongly suggesting that the food oil market (superset) actually shrunk. Let’s see what strongly supported inference we can make from this information:

Answer Choice (A) Nothing in the stimulus mentions relative superiority between products. We are told about a strategy marketing experts believe in, and then given an example where the strategy didn’t succeed.

Answer Choice (B) The marketing experts advice specifically applied to nonexpanding markets, and our example was of one of these markets. This answer wants you to assume that because a strategy was recommended for specific type of market, it shouldn’t be used outside that market. The problem is that we don’t know anything about how effective comparative advertisements are in those other markets. Maybe even though in this particular nonexpanding market the strategy backfired, it would actually work great in some expanding markets.

Answer Choice (C) This answer choice might be appealing because the one example we are given involved a battle between two companies that led to negative consequences for both sides. The problem is that this answer tries to draw a universal conclusion from a particular instance. Maybe in the car market comparative ads used in retaliation are really effective. We generally want to avoid answers that try to derive an absolute rule from just one example.

Correct Answer Choice (D) D is correct because it avoids the error of C. Where C made a claim that in all cases retaliatory comparative ads are a bad idea, C only says that they might risk a market contraction. It’s important that we recognized the overall decline of the food oil market mentioned in the last sentence of the stimulus, because it tells us that comparative advertising in our example did lead to a contraction of the food oil market. While deriving an absolute rule from a particular case is poor reasoning, a particular case is always good evidence for the mere possibility of a thing. If it rained one day that’s bad evidence that it will rain every day, but good evidence that it can rain.

Answer Choice (E) The example we were given didn’t mention any verification on consumers part. Maybe they did verify the claims about health effects made by both sides and that’s why they stopped buying either product.