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“Now with 50% less fat.”

This ubiquitous claim at first glance seems quite straightforward.  But anyone with biology or nutrition background will quickly realize that it is anything but. Marketers often exploit our ignorance of a discipline to make claims that may be true but less than compelling to a critical thinker.

But marketers are not the only ones who manipulate perceptions using data.  While providing hard factual data–especially quantitative data–seems to lend automatic credibility to a claim, it can in fact obfuscate issues much more than clarify.

Accountants and finance professionals do it just as much–perhaps even more often on a day-to-day basis.  Four different bakeries in the same market might, for example, make a claim to its shareholders that it is the leading producer of chocolate chip cookies in its market.  And they could all be telling the truth.

One bakery might, for example, support its claim by comparing number of cookies sold.  Another might measure its position in the market by the weight of cookies sold since 1,000 small cookies could actually be less cookie than 100 jumbo cookies.

Still another bakery might measure its success as total sales revenue for chocolate chip cookies.  And the fourth might claim market leadership as More >