3. One of the most controversial issues in the field of
Marketing is the long-run impact that advertising has on brand
awareness. That is, while a short-term impact is commonly observed
(i.e. increased awareness of the advertised brand within a one-two
week time frame of the ad appearing), the longer-term impact is
less well understood. To this end, the Marketing Research Firm
(MRF) conducted a study to assess the longer-term impact of
advertising on his newly launched brand of detergent, clean-so-good
(CSG). The way MRF conducted the study for CSG was as follows:
i. MRF split the population into families without children
(FWTC) and families with children (FWC).
ii. From each of these two populations MRF selected a random
sample of 50 households without replacement from phone company
records.
iii. Before any advertising occurred, MRM asked each of the
households to check off from a provided list of all major brands of
detergents (of which CSG is one of them) which brands they were
aware of. (The BEFORE data)
iv. The results of the BEFORE study indicated that 12 out of 50
FWTC were aware of CSG while 18 out of 50 FWC were aware.
v. For a one-week period CSG ran a set of national
advertisements in all major markets.
vi. Six months later MRF collected data in an identical fashion
to step (iii), but now AFTER the advertising campaign.
vii. The results of the AFTER study, obtained from a new random
sample (without replacement) from the FWTC and FWC populations
indicated that 14 out of 50 FWTC and 28 out of 50 FWC were aware of
CSG.
Based on this information provided, please answer the following
questions.
a) State an appropriate null and alternative hypothesis to test
that the awareness BEFORE the advertising was the same in the FWTC
and FWC groups versus the alternative that it was not the same in
the FWTC and FWC group.
b) Test the null versus alternative hypothesis from previous
part at the ļ”=0.05 significance level. Be sure to support your
conclusion with the appropriate test statistic and p-value.
c) Suppose that you wanted to test the null versus alternative
hypothesis that the overall fraction of people before the
advertising that were aware of CSG was the same as that after the
advertising. What additional information would you need to make
this assessment? (Hint: the people before the advertising includes
both FWTC and FWC groups. How should we combine the two groups in
our test so it would be representative of population?)
d) Test separately at the ļ”=0.05 significance level, for both
the FWTC and FWC groups, that the fraction of people who were aware
of CSG BEFORE the advertising is the same as the fraction of people
AFTER the advertising, versus the alternative that advertising
changed the awareness.
e) What can you conclude about the long-run effectiveness of
advertising? f) Do you think that the impact of advertising, as
measured here, may be different if an established product (as
compared to a new one) was studied? If yes, how? If no, why
not?