EXAMPLE 3.8 Brands

A brand is a symbol or an image that is associated with a company. An effective brand identifies the company and its products. Using a variety of measures, dollar values for brands can be calculated. In Exercise 1.53 (page 36), you examined the distribution of the values of the top 100 brands.

Suppose that you want to write a research report on some of the characteristics of the companies in this elite group. You decide to look carefully at the websites of 10 companies from the list. One way to select the companies is to use a simple random sample. Here are some details about how to do this using Table B.

We start with a list of the companies with the top 100 brands. This is given in the data file BRANDS. Next, we need to label the companies. In the data file, they are listed with their ranks, 1 to 100. Let’s assign the labels 01 to 99 to the first 99 companies and 00 to the company with rank 100. With these labels, we can use Table B to select the SRS.

Let’s start with line 156 of Table B. This line has the entries 55494 67690 88131 81800 11188 28552 25752 21953. These are grouped in sets of five digits, but we need to use sets of two digits for our randomization. Here is line 156 of Table B in sets of two digits: 55 49 46 76 90 88 13 18 18 00 11 18 82 85 52 25 75 22 19 53.

Using these random digits, we select Kraft (55), Accenture (49), Fox (46), Starbucks (76), Ericsson (90), Chase (88), Oracle (13), Disney (18; we skip the second 18 because we have already selected Disney to be in our SRS), Estee Lauder (00; recoded from rank 100), and BMW (11).