From: Qian(Chen) Liu [qianliu@seas.upenn.edu]
Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 11:32 AM
To: Michael Kearns
Subject: SSS assignment 1

Attachments: 25_brands.xls

I compiled a list of 25 skin care brands with varied product price
and popularity, such as Lancome, Estee Lauder, Clinique, Olay, etc.

The parties who bid for these brand keywords are either their
official websites or distributors' websites. 9 among the 25 brands
have their official websites appear in the Overture's sponsored links,
and all the 9 official websites are ranked the first place. It seems that
if a company bids for its brand,  it always goes for the first place as
its bidding strategy. It's unsurprising because no company would like
to be outbid by others on its own brand.

I collect the highest bid price for each brand among the distributors'
websites.  I suspect that the distributors' bid prices would be
correlated with the brands' product price and their popularity, in the
sense that the higher a brand's product price and popularity are, the
more distributors can profit, the more they are willing to spend on the
advertisement. By looking at the ranking, the 3 brands of the highest
bid prices are Clarins, Borghese and Elizabeth Arden, which are all
high-end skin care brands. Neutrogena takes the 12th spot. A low-end
brand such as Neutrogena is placed roughly at the middle of the ranking
probably because of its popularity. I mark each brand with the price
of its eye cream, which ranges from $10 to $80. I think the price of
an eye cream is quite a good measure of a brand's product pricing.
$10-$20 is low-end, $20-$40 is mid-end and >=$50 is high-end.
The correlation between the prices of the keywords and the eye creams
is 0.298, which indicates a weak correlation between the two. I failed
to come up with a measure for each brand's popularity so I haven't
come up with any correlation between the keyword price and 
popularity......    

Please see the attached spreadsheet for the data.

thanks,
Qian Liu