Misleading Advertising Law

At the Pink Truth, a Sales Director is Caught Begging for Sales to meet their self imposed deadline for being "a Pink Cadillac Unit".

The Pinktruth blog was previously known as "Mary Kay Sucks", a name which did not last long, for obvious reasons.

Many of the commentators are fierce in their denunciation of the Sales Director, correctly believing that it is deceptive for this sales director to issue a call for increased inventory.

However, only a few of the Mary Kay ladies, or ex-Mary Kay rather, see the psychological trap here for the Sales Director.

Here is one good post:

"You know------if her unit really wanted her to drive a FREE CAR, they'd just all cut a check for $600 and give her the cash!! Then it really would be free. Something to have in reality - free and clear. But no, she wants her unit to provide production so she'll be responsible for $900 + insurance every month and the ILLUSION of being an MK Super Star Director!! And we all know earning the car and keeping the car are two different things. When it takes 2-3 months to get to her, she'll undoubtedly have already lost it!! But Corporate already got their Moo-Lah so what do they care??!!"

The problem for this Sales Director is that the free car, like all items that appear to be something for nothing, is going to end up being quite expensive. She may end up either faking orders to maintain her production level, or worse.

Is there a logical reason that this illusion is so seductive? Or is the Sales Director just a "stupid pimp"?

The basis of this illusion is something I have wrote about before, the logical difference between diagnostic and causal inferences, in a different context.

In this case, we have two inferences:

C) If a Sales Director is successful, and achieves $16,000 per month in sales, then she will obtain the Pink Cadillac. This is a causal story, the success in sales brings about the reward.

D) If the Sales Director has obtained the Pink Cadillac, then she is successful. This is the diagnostic story; we infer from the presence of the car to the existence of genuine high sales.

But, critically, C) can be true, while D) is false. The causal story is easy to believe and justify, but the only evidence we have -unless we are the accountants of the sales director, requires D) also to be true, if we want to infer success from the only observable - that damned Pink Cadillac.

The nifty observation here is that the Sales Director knows if D) is true; but even if it is false, if she can get enough people to believe that D) is true, enough people will act as if it is true.

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