"The Excelsior Company plans to introduce its own brand of coffee. Since coffee is an expensive food item, and since there are already many established brands of coffee, the best way to gain customers for the Excelsior brand is to do what Superior, the leading coffee company, did when it introduced the newest brand in its line of coffees: conduct a temporary sales promotion that offers free samples, price reductions, and discount coupons for the new brand."

A recent memorandum at the Excelsior company proclaimed that the company plans to introduce a new brand of coffee. In the preceding statement the author claims that in order to gain customers Excelsior company will need to follow in the footsteps of its top competitor the Superior company and have a temporary sales promotion that offers price reuductions and free samples. Though his claim may have merit, the author presents a poorly reasoned argument, based on questionable premises and assumptions, therefore based on the current evidence presented we cannot accept this argument as valid.

The primary issue with the authors reasoning lies in his unsubstantiated premises. For example, the author states that because the Superior company was able to succeed in promoting their new coffee brands through promotions that the Excelsior company will be able to succeed with this strategy as well. However, the author does not state wether the Superior company was the most popular coffee company before they began introducing new brands. The reason their new brands may have been successful is because their customers prior to the introduction of the new brands really liked Superiors older brands and were willing to try the new brands for this reason. In addition the author does not mention if the new brands introduced by the Superior company gained the company new customers. The authors premises , lack any legitamate support and render his conclusion unacceptable.

In addition the author makes several assumptions that remain unproven. For example, the author states that Excelsior plans to attract customers by having a sales promotion where the prices of the new coffee will be cheaper than the price that they will sell the coffee for in the future, however, he does not mention wether the promotion prices offered by the Excelsior company willl be less expensive than the current prices that the Superior company is charging. Clearly, if the prices are higher than what Superior is charging for thier established coffee brands than people may not want to experiment with the new coffee.

While the author does have several issues with the argument, there are several ways that the argument can be strenghened. For instance, the author could state wether the price of the new coffee during the promotion will be less expensive than the price of the coffee offered at other neighboring coffee shops, also, the author may want to research if the Superior company became the most popular after introducing new coffee brands, or wether it was the most popular before that. If the author would fix these gaps in his logic then his argument would much stronger.

In sum, the authors current argument is based on unsupported premises and assumptions. If the author hopes to persuade readers he will need to fix the flaws in his logic and clearly explain his assumptions. Without these things, he will most likely fail to convince most readers.