This is a piece of marketing material I got recently from some stupid company. It abounds with poor reasoning.
Does your [system metric] surpass a 70% succes rate (outperforming the industry average of just 30%)? Does your [other system metric] exceed 25% (putting the industry’s 5-7% average to shame)?
Why, no it doesn’t. You have me interested. Pray, continue.
These are the results our top-performing clients are getting
You have lost my interest. I have not bothered to work out the statistics, but if the average is 30%, out of the 5,700 clients you quote later, the fact that some of them might get very high metrics, simply by chance alone, seems rather… obvious. Furthermore, all clients are different, there are always those that by the nature of what they do get higher scores at any given metric.
yes, even ones who [do a lot of this].
No, really? You think there might be a little cause and effect confusion? Maybe they do more because it works? Or maybe they do more, so they spend time making sure it works?
And [our company] is one of the reason why.
One of the reasons? Boy, you’re really going out on a limb there.
It bugs me when people say statistics is just lies. It isn’t, it’s a technique that can be used or misused. Jackholes like this companies’ “Sales Manager, Strategic Marketing” don’t help.