Informal Business Report
Background
In part II of this assignment, we continue to outline various business aspects of our lemonade stand. As you continue to learn new concepts in this course, you have seen how a lemonade stand can help us understand and apply these concepts. In Part II of your lemonade stand we will incorporate concepts from previous weeks and apply these to your newly created company.
Scenario
In week 3, you created a lemonade stand that you opened in your local neighborhood; you created a name, developed a mission statement, outlined a CSR plan, and picked a pricing strategy for this new company. This week you will continue to develop your idea by writing an informal business report that will share your plans with a potential business investor. A report template is available in Doc Sharing to guide you through formatting of this assignment; however, the main prompts you should address in the report include:
– Branding strategy. In Part I, you decided part of the brand when you developed your pricing strategy. Continue with the other parts of the marketing mix (Place, Promotion, and Product), and discuss how the lemonade stand should be branded utilizing this marketing mix (Chapter 14).
– Opportunities for new locations. Your stand in your neighborhood has been very successful and you are considering expanding operations. In doing so, you will need to outline some criteria for potential new locations (Chapter 15).
– Promotion plans. You have a $ 10,000 budget to promote your stand in the local community. Please outline two or three ways you could promote this business (please include costs involved in these promotions) (Chapter 16).
– Employee Training. You have hired several people to run your lemonade stand, as you simply are too involved in the strategic aspects of the business. As such, you have seen sales drop. What are some ways you can motivate your employees to improve sales? (Chapter 10)
Activity
Once you have considered the points above, please provide responses and explanations using the template provided in Doc Sharing (titled Lemonade Stand Informal Business Report). Utilize your textbook and apply the lessons we have learned in previous weeks to develop and support your plans. By offering support and developing your response, you must provide examples, elaboration, or justification, often in the form of information gathered from your textbook. When integrating support from your textbook, be sure to use APA style to provide in-text citations within the paragraph and a full end reference on a separate Reference Page after the Business Plan. Examples of APA formatting are included in the template.
This informal business report will be evaluated on how well you apply the concepts that are detailed in the textbook to a practical idea. In order to receive the highest grade, it is required that you review the textbook and cite specific areas of the text in your responses (taking care in citing these properly in APA style). Additionally, while this is not an English class and while the content of your ideas is most important, grammar and sentence structure will account for a portion of your report grade. Please be sure to write well-developed responses in complete sentence and paragraph format.
Note: For this assignment and other college writing assignments, please note that when you reference or cite a text, if you use words that are directly from a source, they must be in quotations and cited. If you are just referencing them and have changed the words, a citation is still required. One final point, when writing anything in college, you must adhere to the 80/20 rule: 80% of the papers should be in your own words, while 20% make up any citations you may add. Violation of this rule could result in a zero for the assignment.
