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Can you really say that?

Article Excerpt
At a marketing and public policy conference some years back, the researchers' review of gun advertising concluded that women were "disproportionately" and "unfairly" targeted by these messages. The former term would probably be acceptable if taken in the pure data results sense, since women were found to be clear target segments for more than half of the messages studied. But taken with the latter term, the negative connotations were inescapable. And since the conference was dedicated to public policy issues, the dangling implication was that some sort of regulatory response was necessary. During the discussion, one audience member asked whether the authors were asserting that "only possessors of a pale penis can be presumed to resist the persuasive power of pistol promotions." (1)

Sarcastic discussion questions notwithstanding, this goes beyond the not-uncommon practice in which many business critics readily label adults as "vulnerable" in need of protection for no other reason than being a member of a minority group (as discussed in Wolburg 2005). Their data did not provide a basis for saying that women were an unfair or improper target audience, only that they had the attention of the advertisers. As business people become the modern cultural villains, all types of conspiracy theories are repeatedly asserted regardless of the data support (e.g., see Broyles 2006; Mizerski 1995; Rotfeld 2001, 2008).

It is easy to presume all sorts of evil motives for business practices. What is more difficult is to...

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