Brand valuations are critical to CEOs, financial and marketing executives, security analysts, institutional investors, and others who depend on well researched, reliable information needed for assessments, and comparisons in decision making. Millward Brown Optimor has developed the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands for WPP, the world’s largest communications services group. Unlike other studies, the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands fuses consumer measures of brand equity with financial measures to place a financial value on brands. The file BrandZTechFin contains the brand values for two sectors in the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands for 2014: the technology sector and the financial institutions sector.

a. Assuming that the population variances are equal, is there evidence of a difference between the technology sector and the financial institutions sector with respect to mean brand value? (Use α = .05.)

b. Repeat (a), assuming that the population variances are not equal.

c. Compare the results of (a) and (b).