Minitab Case

Pelican stores in its promotion of sending out discount coupons for customers not ‘regular’ to their stores have brought out not only a whole new series of customers to shop in their stores, they have also brought out a whole new data that can be analysed to assess what they should do to retain existing customers and attract new ones.

Most of my analysis is done by looking at subsets of the original worksheet by using the ‘data’ tab in Minitab and then analysing patterns for each subset. Since the worksheet shows data for different customers of different types who might use payment methods of different types and other such variations, using sub work sheets has been a useful tool to make specific analysis. Dividing the work sheet into ‘Regular’ and ‘Promotional’ customers brought about some interesting results because the promotional customers were given promotional coupons whereas the regular customers weren’t.  Following is the total number of items purchased by the regular customers:

Sum of Items

Sum of Items = 501

Following is the total number of items purchased by promotional customers:

Sum of Items

Sum of Items = 608

It clearly shows that sending out promotional coupons have expedited the sale of items. It is also interesting to see what happens with net sales for each type of customers.
Following is the total sales achieved from regular customers

Sum of Net Sales ($)        

Sum of Net Sales ($) = 31587

Also, Following is the total sales achieved from the promotional customers:

Sum of Net Sales ($)

Sum of Net Sales ($) = 40293

It goes to show that distributing promotional coupons have certainly accelerated sales along with number of items sold. But it is to be kept in mind that out of the 300 observations in the data set, 142 to were promotional customers and 158 were regular customers. Since it is not an equal spread, I checked the mean of sales achieved from the regular and promotional customers which produced surprising results. Following is the mean sales achieved from regular customers:

Mean of Net Sales ($)

Mean of Net Sales ($) = 255.019

Following is the mean of sales achieved from promotional customers:

Mean of Net Sales ($)

Mean of Net Sales ($) = 222.444

This makes for startling results because while the sum of items sold and the sum of net sales were significantly higher from promotional customers, the mean of Net sales from regular customers is in fact greater. This goes to show that sending out promotional coupons have not overshadowed the sales of regular customers. This proves that their own customers are loyal to pelican stores. If there was a word out that only the promotional customers were the ones that are receiving promotional coupons could upset the regular customers and their will to continue to buy from Pelican, but the data in fact shows that it has not deterred them.