Solutions

Task 1
A consumer products company depends on on direct mail marketing pieces as a major
component of its advertising campaigns. The company has three different designs for a new
brochure and wants to evaluate their effectiveness, as there are substantial differences in costs
between the three designs.
A one-way ANOVA was conducted in RCBD (Randomized complete block design) to test
whether there has a difference between three designs for a new brochure and which one is
effective for new brochure. 5000 samples of each design was collected from four different
regions of the country.

Task 2
a) Yes, we need to consider blocking in the ANOVA. Four regions are the blocks in the
ANOVA.
b) A two-way ANOVA was performed using Minitab software.
c) This model meets all the assumptions except concerns with normality as well as
inequality of variance.
d) The first set of residual plots presented below represent the untransformed data.
Concerns with normality as well as inequality of variance are presented. The second
set of residual plots represent transformed data and do not identify significant
violations of the assumptions. The residuals vs. design plot indicates a slight
inequality of variance; however, not a strong violation and an improvement over the
non-transformed data.
e) Relevant outputs (Tables and Charts) from Minitab were included.
Task 3
Conclusions and recommendations
A one-way between-groups analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to investigate the
effectiveness of three different design on the number of responses for a new brochure.
Inspection of the skewness, kurtosis and Shapiro-Wilk statistics indicated that the
assumption of normality as well as inequality of variance was violated. A square root
transformation was applied to overcome this problem. No assumptions was violated on
transformed data.
There was a statistically significant difference at the p < .05 level between three designs
for new brochure: F (2, 11) = 60.47, p = .0001 in the model. Post-hoc comparisons using
the Tukey HSD test indicated that design 1 and design 3 did not differ significantly from
each other. The mean score for design 2 (M = 21.69, SE = 0.35) was significantly higher
from design 1 (M = 17.17, SE = 0.35) and design 3 (M = 16.69, SE = 0.35).
I will recommend design 2 for new brochure because mean response of design 2 is
significantly higher than design 1 and design 3.