Assessment 1 — Deal Autopsy

Pick one real promotion and show, with evidence, whether it is actually a good deal.

Due: 21 August 2026 · Weight: 20%

The brief#

Find one real promotion that looks like a good deal, and show exactly why it is — or isn’t.

Pick a real advertised promotion (a screenshot or link is fine as evidence). Identify:

• the advertised claim (“50% off”, “buy one get one half price”, etc.)
• the reference price it’s measured against, and how you’d verify it
• anything missing from the headline: exclusions, minimum spend, expiry, shipping
• the actual effective saving, computed, not eyeballed
• which framing techniques from Week 3 are doing work on the reader

Then answer the real question: is this genuinely good, just ordinary with a loud badge, or impossible to tell from the available information? “Marketing is misleading” is not enough by itself. Show the numbers that make that true or false for this promotion.

Evidence packet#

Choose a promotion specific enough that another student could check your work. Include:

• a screenshot or link showing the advertised claim
• the date you captured it
• the displayed sale price and displayed reference price, if one is present
• any visible restrictions: expiry, categories, exclusions, member-only pricing, shipping, minimum spend, or stock limits
• any assumption you had to make because the retailer did not provide enough information

The promotion may be boring. In fact, a boring example with clean evidence is better than a spectacular badge whose source disappears before it can be checked.

Autopsy template#

Use this structure unless you have a stronger one:

1. Claim: what the advertisement wants the shopper to believe.
2. Baseline: what price the claim is measured against, and whether that baseline is recent, rarely used, impossible to check, or missing.
3. Restrictions: what conditions change the apparent saving.
4. Calculation: the effective saving in dollars, including fees or threshold spending where relevant.
5. Judgement: whether the promotion is good, weak, or undecidable from the available evidence.

What you submit#

A short written autopsy (roughly 500–800 words, or equivalent in a structured format) covering the five points above, with the promotion’s source cited or screenshotted. Any invented numbers used to fill a gap in public information must be clearly labelled as an assumption, not presented as the retailer’s own figure.

What strong work looks like#

Strong work separates facts from guesses. It does not simply say “50% off is misleading”; it shows what price the 50% was measured against, whether that price can be trusted, and how much money a buyer would actually save. The best autopsies also say clearly when the evidence is too thin for a strong answer.

Common traps#

• treating the printed reference price as true without checking it
• reporting the advertised percentage instead of computing dollar saving
• ignoring shipping, membership or minimum-spend conditions
• using invented assumptions without labelling them as assumptions
• reaching a moral judgement before the arithmetic has done any work