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Question: "Reader-response cards" are used by marketers to advertise their product and obtain sales leads. These cards are placed in magazines and trade publications. Readers detach and mail in the cards to indicate their interest in the product, expecting literature or a phone call in return. How effective are these cards (called "bingo cards" in the industry) as a marketing tool? Performark, a Minneapolis business that helps companies close on sales leads, attempted to answer this question by responding to 17,000 card-advertisements placed by industrial marketers in a wide variety of trade publications over a 6-year period. Performark kept track of how long it took for each advertiser to respond. A summary of the response times is given in the following table.
Advertiser's Response Time Percentage
Never responded .............................. 21
13-59 days ..................................... 33
60-120 days ................................... 34
More than 120 days ........................... 12
Total ............................................ 100
a. Describe the variable measured by Performark.
b. These results were displayed in the form of a pie chart. Reconstruct the pie chart from the information given in the table.
c. How many of the 17,000 advertisers never responded to the sales lead?
d. Advertisers typically spend at least a million dollars on a reader-response card marketing campaign. Many industrial marketers feel these "bingo cards" are not worth their expense. Does the information in the pie chart, part b, support this contention? Explain why or why not. If not, what information can be gleaned from the pie chart to help potential "bingo card" campaigns?
Answer:
a. The variable measured by Performark is the length of time it took for each advertiser to respond back. b. The pie chart is: 
c. Twenty-one percent or .21 × 17,000 = 3,570 of the advertisers never respond to the sales lead. d. The information from the pie chart does not indicate how effective the "bingo cards" are. It just indicates how long it takes advertisers to respond, if at all.
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