What do headlines really mean?

Here's a headline I read today, "February Mac sales up 43%." It sounds fantastic doesn't it? It sounds like Apple is doing really well and is taking over the world with more and more people switching from Windows PCs to MacBooks and iMacs. Here's another headline from today's news, "40% of Blackberry users willing to trade in for an iPhone." Another brilliant result for Apple and a kick in the teeth for Blackberry. However, what do these headlines really mean? Actually, they mean very little unless you dig really deeply into the background.

Take the first headline for example. Sales are up 43%. Unless you know how many sales have been made and what the total size of the market is, the headline means nothing. If I set up a computer store and sell two computers this year and three next year, the sales growth will be 50%. I could claim to have one of the fastest, perhaps the fastest, growing computer businesses in the market. But three sales against the million that are sold each year is nothing.

That's a silly example, of course, but consider this, company X selling 10 million computers a year would have to sell another 1 million to achieve 10% growth, but company Y selling 2 million a year would only have to sell another 200,000. When you're a small company it is easier to achieve big percentage sales growth. If company X sold another 500,000 their sales growth would be the less unimpressive sounding 5%. It would actually have sold more computers and increased sales by a bigger volume, but the 5% sales growth sounds poorer than the 10% achieved by the smaller company. Of course, 10% growth is brilliant for the company, but in terms of the size of the market, it may not be so impressive.

Let's look at the second headline, "40% of Blackberry users willing to trade in for an iPhone." Now suppose the headline said "40% of Ford owners willing to trade in for a Ferrari." I have no doubt they would, but what car will they actually buy next time around? Yes, another Ford. They might desire a Ferrari, but they need something cheaper and more practical, so they get a Ford. I bought a new computer at Christmas. I would have loved to have traded it in for a Mac, but instead I got a Windows PC. A desire to own something doesn't always translate into a sale. And the results of polls and surveys can be skewed by the questions being asked too.

The point I'm making here is that you should always think carefully when you read headlines, see statistics, sales figures, results of surveys and so on. They don't always mean what you think they mean.