Critical Reasoning

Advertising by mail has become much less effective, with fewer consumers responding. Because consumers are increasingly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of junk mail they receive, most discard almost all otters without considering them. Thus an effective way for top corporations to improve response rates would be to more carefully target the individuals to whom they mail advertising, thereby cutting down on the amount of junk mall each consumer receives.

Which of the following, if true, would most support this recommendation?

(A) There are cost effective means by which corporations that currently advertise by mail could improve response rates.
(B) Many successful corporations are already carefully targeting the individuals to whom they mail advertising.
(C) Any consumer who, immediately alter receiving an advertisement by mail, merely glances at it is very likely to discard it.
(D) Improvements in the quality of the advertising materials used in mail that is carefully targeted to individuals can improve the response rate for such mail.
(E) Response rates to carefully targeted advertisements by mail are considerably higher, on average, than response rates to most other forms of advertising.

OA: [spoiler] E [/spoiler]

Correct option looks like a bouncer to me. In the correct option the comparison is done to some other kind of marketing. Actually if we study the premise with caution there is an stated logic.

Because consumers are increasingly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of junk mail they receive, most discard almost all otters without considering them.

If we further look into the premise -
Thus an effective way for top corporations to improve response rates would be to more carefully target the individuals to whom they mail advertising, thereby cutting down on the amount of junk mall each consumer receives.

We are dealing only about the targeted email marketing. There is no other form of marketing mentioned in the passage. Although strengthen question needs some extra information, but based on so many questions that I have solved from Official resources this option seems to me a Bouncer.

Option B also seems to be a contender to me.

richachampion wrote:Correct option looks like a bouncer to me. In the correct option the comparison is done to some other kind of marketing.

I totally agree. While superficially the OA seems to be the best of the answer choices, the truth is that the OA does not really support the argument. The fact that the response rates to carefully targeted mailings are higher than the response rates to most other forms of advertising does not indicate that more carefully targeting mailings and thereby reducing the amount of of mail that consumers receive will increase the response rate to mailings.

Option B also seems to be a contender to me.

B also does not really support anything. The fact that successful corporations are carefully targeting their marketing does not mean that those corporations are successful because they are getting better than average results from their marketing.

Further the point of the argument is not that carefully targeted mailing done by any one corporation works better than less carefully targeted mailing done by that corporation. The point is, or seems to be, that if all top corporations were to SIMULTANEOUSLY more carefully target their mailing, consumers would get less junk mail in general and therefore pay more attention to the mail that they get.

Since none of the answer choices support that argument, this question is indeed a "bouncer."

Marty Murray wrote:Since none of the answer choices support that argument, this question is indeed a "bouncer."

Thank you so much, Mr. Murray. Actually, before asking you to Intervene I spend around one and half hours over this question. I was also worried you might feel pestered as I am sending you a couple of private messages daily to help me. You must be having your priorities and commitments.

I scored 740(In my first real exam i scored meager 470) last year and after a Gap of around 1 year, I resumed my preparation in July 2016 again. This time, I changed my gears to a new dimension. Of the total time spend on one CR question, I started to spend 75%-85% time on reading the Premise or argument and understanding the whole flow of the argument. In just 20-30 questions I noticed a serious quality in my reasoning ability and in a course of solving around 100-150 Official questions, my reasoning was drastically improved.

Based on that experience I find that If this would have been some other CR official question then Option A would be an Out of Scope choice, but here as you have confirmed that this is indeed a Bouncer now I am feeling relaxed as in the morning I was feeling shattered.