Critical thinking skills; Language misuse in advertising

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1) I have worked in market research and advertising, and let me tell you, more often than not, my assumptions are wrong. It is very dangerous to make assumptions about projects. If you are wrong, you may have taken the wrong path. Your clients will be angry since they think that you might have gone above their head and proceeded on a project without their confirmation. You might also end up costing your company time, resources and reputation. If you proceeded in a project based on assumptions, then you wasted client resources, other people's time and money. Plus your company may get a negative wrap for this.

But occasionally, you do make the correct assumption, and at least you do not get any negative consequences out of it. Your boss however might still not be thrilled with your actions, since when you assume, you are almost making guesses, and you could have equally gotten it wrong.

Some real life examples.

So there are some exceptions to the rule when you have to make assumptions - if you are on a very tight deadline, and you have no time to clarify the situation from your client or boss. One time when I was working in market research, we were about to send out our survey to thousands of people in the market research panel. It had to get sent out that evening. It was already past business hours, and our client had left for the day. I realized that there was a problem with the target audience that we will be sending out the survey to. The client had specified that he wants "educated" people to fill out his survey. However, we forgot to ask him to specify what he meant by educated.

Does he want high school grads? College? University? Masters? PhD?

We were in a tight time frame, and we then had to make an assumption on whom to send the ...