Question

Business marketing publications.Business-to-business marketing describes the field of marketing between multiple business entities. The Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing (Vol. 15, 2008) produced a pie chart describing the number of business-to-business marketing articles published in all journals, by topical area, between 1971 and 2006. The data used to produce the pie chart are shown in the table.

Area	Number
Global Marketing Sales Management Buyer Behavior Relationships Innovation Marketing Strategy Channels/Distribution Marketing Research Services	235 494 478 498 398 280 213 131 136
Total	2,863

a.Compute the relative frequencies for the nine topical areas shown in the table. Interpret the relative frequency for Buyer Behavior.

b.Use the relative frequencies, part a, to construct a pie chart for the data. Why is the slice for Marketing Research smaller than the slice for Sales Management?

Short answer

a)

b)

Step-by-step solution

 Step 1: Computing the relative frequency and interpreting it

$\mathbf{Relative}\mathbf{}\mathbf{Frequency}\mathbf{=}\frac{\mathbf{Frequency}}{\mathbf{Total}\mathbf{}\mathbf{Frequency}}$

Relative Frequency tells us the frequency with which a particular area is repeated or is noted in the observations.

The relative Frequency for Buyer Behavior is 0.16. It means that 16% of them were on Buyer Behavior out of the total number of articles. Out of 100 articles, 16 would be on Buyer Behavior.

Constructing a pie chart and comparing Marketing Research and Sales Management

To construct a pie chart, we will need the angles. So we will use the following formula to find them: $\mathbf{Angle}\mathbf{=}\mathbf{Relativefrequency}\mathbf{\times }{\mathbf{360}}^{\mathbf{o}}$

The pie diagram will be as follows:

Slice of Marketing Research is smaller than Sales Management because the proportion of marketing research articles is less than the proportion of Sales management.