The Most Misused Term In Marketing

By. Ron Shevlin

Compete recently ran article claiming that Mobile Twitter Users Are the Ideal Audience for Advertisers. In it, Compete reports that, compared to other Twitter users,  mobile Twitter users in the U.S. are 86% more likely to be on Twitter several times a day and 57% less likely to use Twitter on a desktop computer.

Compete didn’t stop there. A graphic shows a number of other differences:

My take: The term “more likely” is, in all likelihood (pun intended), inappropriate here. In addition, the term is quite possibly the most misused term in marketing.

It’s possible that my analysis — in THIS case — is wrong, but I know for a fact that it happens in the reporting of many other studies. So, if I’m wrong here, my apologies to Compete. But the explanation will go to show why so many others go wrong.

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