Big Lies
A military statesman once said, big lies are more believable than small ones (Hitler.) Which got me thinking about a certain claim by a certain cell-phone company that they have "the fewest dropped calls of any carrier." Now Ger-beans is probably not a good test case, or maybe he is, but just about every conversation with him and said carrier involves a dropped call at least once during the conversation.
So I got curious about how one substantiates the "fewest dropped calls claim." Especially since cell phone outage statistics are private. Can't have them terrorists knowing which carrier they should use, after all. On their site, the only reference the carrier makes to the research is "based on nationwide experience among national wireless carriers." Nothing about how many in the sample, how the research was conducted or by whom. Other carriers tout that they, in fact, are the "most reliable" or the "highest ranking in customer satisfaction."
Kind of reminds me of those inane claims about "lose up to 30lbs!" ... wonder how they would react if you offered to send them a payment of "up to the full amount of their product?"
A couple of useful watchdog sites have emerged which investigate these type of claims:
Which may be handy links to tuck away for future investigations. Here is how one weighed in on the Cingular issue. So what we find is a key piece of missing information on the claim:
"Has the fewest dropped calls..." should have included "than some of the competition across some section of the population for certain time period groupings."
Sometimes that pesky "context" makes more of a difference to the audience than the presenters, eh?
So I got curious about how one substantiates the "fewest dropped calls claim." Especially since cell phone outage statistics are private. Can't have them terrorists knowing which carrier they should use, after all. On their site, the only reference the carrier makes to the research is "based on nationwide experience among national wireless carriers." Nothing about how many in the sample, how the research was conducted or by whom. Other carriers tout that they, in fact, are the "most reliable" or the "highest ranking in customer satisfaction."
Kind of reminds me of those inane claims about "lose up to 30lbs!" ... wonder how they would react if you offered to send them a payment of "up to the full amount of their product?"
A couple of useful watchdog sites have emerged which investigate these type of claims:
Which may be handy links to tuck away for future investigations. Here is how one weighed in on the Cingular issue. So what we find is a key piece of missing information on the claim:
"Has the fewest dropped calls..." should have included "than some of the competition across some section of the population for certain time period groupings."
Sometimes that pesky "context" makes more of a difference to the audience than the presenters, eh?
I too have had the same problem with Gerbeans with that particular phone company. Research "statistics" are at best questionable to me if not downright knowingly misleading.
ReplyDeleteOne of these days they'zagonna have fewer dropped calls cause got fewer customers...at least one fewer...course i may find out its the same where ere i go.
ReplyDelete