Managerial Decision I: Developing advertising strategies by understanding key demographic variables

To understand the demographics of your target audience, you obtain data on Facebook users in Australia, The US, and Japan.  Google Ad Planner generates statistics on key demographics such as Gender and Income. Taking a randomly selected sample of 2000 Facebook users from each country produced the data in the file AdPlanner.xlsx, available on the course resources website (Assignments folder).

You decide to use Descriptive Summaries to help understand the data and devise an advertising strategy for one of your best selling products, the oNetbook, by Orange Computers.

i.   Produce histograms in Excel for the demographic variables Gender and Income, for each country. For full marks, be sure to follow the formatting instructions for the histograms given below.

EXCEL Instructions:   For each country, you will need to create Bin columns for the histogram.  E.g. BinG, could contain the Bin numbers from 1 to 2 in steps of 1 (i.e. 1, 2) for Gender, and a second Bin column could be called BinI, with the appropriate range of numbers for Income with a step size of 1.  E.g. for Australia, BinI will contain the numbers from 1 through to 6. Refer to Topic 6 in the Excel Booklet for instructions on how to obtain and format a histogram. For full marks make sure the title of each histogram ends with your network ID (e.g. Histogram of Income bloggsj001).

ii.  Use Excel to produce Descriptive Summaries for the demographic variables Gender and Income for each country. Also compute Quartile 1, Quartile 3 and the Interquartile Range for each descriptive summary.  Add your network ID to the Descriptive Summaries output column names for each demographic variable (e.g. Gender should become Gender bloggsj001).

EXCEL Instructions:   Refer to Topic 7 in the Excel Booklet for instructions on how to obtain Descriptive Statistics, the two quartiles and the interquartile range.

iii.  In the Analysis section of your report, answer (a)-(c) below.  The analysis should not take more than 4 paragraphs of text.  Alternatively, bullet point format reporting is acceptable:

a)  Explain the purpose of Managerial Decision I.  Then, for each country, describe the shape (symmetry, modality, outliers) of the Gender and Income distributions.

Instructions for identifying outliers:  Whether an observation is an outlier is a matter of judgement. One rule commonly used for identifying outliers is the 1.5×IQR rule. An observation is suspected to be an outlier if it is more than 1.5×IQR below the first quartile Q1 or above the third quartile Q3.

(b)  Nominate appropriate summary measures (central tendency, dispersion) for the Gender and Income distributions for each country.   Give reason(s) for your choice and be sure to interpret the values of the summary measures you have chosen.  Be careful when interpreting Income!

(c)  Explain where you would market the following product and why: the oNetbook, the newest netbook from Orange Computers.  This netbook is popular with both genders and is favoured heavily by people earning at least AU$100,000, as Orange is the latest must-have in electronics.