Argument Essay 3
The following appeared in a corporate planning memo at ABC Cereal Company, the makers of Better Bran cereal. "Sales of Better Bran have declined in recent years, for reasons that management has now identified. First, Better Bran is a cereal with high sugar content, and recent research studies have found that most consumers say they are concerned about the amount of sugar added to their breakfast cereal. Second, the price of Better Bran has increased by 5 percent in each of the last three years. Therefore, to increase our company's profits we need to reduce the amount of sugar in Better Bran and lower Better Bran's price."
The given argument has to do with a internal review of ABC Cereal Company, a company that manufactures Better Bran cereals. Over the last few years, the net sales of Better Bran have been falling, and the authors of the given corporate planning memo state some factors that they believe have caused this trend. The decision reached by the authors of the memo for this decline is that ABC Cereal Company needs to both reduce sugar content and prices of its Better Bran cereal brand if it wishes to increase sales.
On prima facie analysis, the argument, as a whole, does not come across as sufficiently well-reasoned, mainly because the given argument seems a little too brief; conciseness is sometimes a positive factor, but in this case, the memo seems hindered by its lack of enough justification for its conclusion. The decision reached by the authors of the memo is that ABC Cereal Company needs to both reduce sugar content and prices of its Better Bran cereal brand if it wishes to increase sales. To make this claim, the authors have necessarily have had to make a few assumptions - one such glaring assumption being that they do not consider any factors other than price and sugar content as having anything to do with the drop in sales.
The memo states as known the "fact" that Better Bran has high sugar content. At this point, it is unclear whether it is Better Bran alone that has a high sugar content, or whether it is a characteristic feature of all cereals of this type, including cereals manufactured by competing companies. This ambiguity stands out; it could be easily resolved by the memo stating how it stands with respect to competitors in every field. At the same time, we can very easily envision a rival company (say Company X) where sales have also declined - they may state in their memo that "sales have declined due to its low sugar content compared to competing brands such as ABC's Better Bran." This example is a measure of the subjectivity of a phrase like "high sugar content" - what is too high for one "consumer" can very conceivably be too low for another.
A statement is also made about consumers being worried about the sugar content of their breakfast cereals. The fear of a disease such as diabetes, coupled with the natural tendencies of hypochondria probably have led to this being an issue. The argument overly emphasizes what should really be a relatively neglible factor when compared to other issues like taste, marketing strategy, etc.
The argument thus does not satisfactorily address the issue of declining sales of Better Bran - mainly due to its concentration on trivial issues and ignoring other, possibly more relevant ones.
This time, I stuck to the time limit of 30 minutes - this is definitely the worst of the three essays I've written to date.