Week 9 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 9 — Is the Free Juice Free? A Juice Bar Sets Its Promotion Budget — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Business Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 8 of the term — set a promotion budget, count what a punch card really costs, and test a promotional claim.

This week you learned how a business reaches more customers: distribution and marketing channels, the intermediaries, the supply chain, the promotional mix and integrated marketing communications, the promotion budget and the punch card as a cost, digital commerce, and the claims a promotion may and may not make. In this assignment you set one small juice bar's promotion budget, count what its punch card really costs, test a claim it could post, and explain the idea to someone who has never studied business. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Business Case Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

The case is illustrative, built for this course and not real data. A small juice bar sells fresh juices from a counter near a busy bus stop. Like the coffee cart in this week's chapter, the case has no named people.

The juice bar's figures, line by line:

Juices the plan expects to sell in the coming year: 12,000.
Price of one juice: 7 dollars.
Promotion budget rate: 5 percent of planned revenue.
Fruit, ice, and cup for one juice: 3 dollars.
Punch card: buy five juices, and the sixth is free.

Work these two problems, showing every step of the arithmetic:

What is the juice bar's promotion budget for the year, in dollars?
Across one full punch card, what is the revenue from the paid juices minus the variable cost of all six juices, in dollars?

Beside each answer, add a brief interpretation:

Problem 1: say which revenue figure the budget rate applies to and why taking 5 percent of the juice bar's break-even revenue would be the wrong base; then name at least two promotional tools the budget could fund and place each one in the promotional mix.
Problem 2: explain why the free sixth juice is not free to the juice bar, naming the supplies it uses and the sale it gives up; then write one claim the juice bar could post about its punch card, test it against specific, true, and supportable, name the federal agency that polices deceptive advertising, and apply one of the ethical-reasoning questions to it beyond what the law requires.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend who runs a dog-walking service asks you, "If I give every sixth walk free, that doesn't cost me anything, right?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains what a sales promotion is, answers the question in everyday words, and names one limit, including that the juice bar case is illustrative and that the cost of a reward depends on whether it brings customers back who would not have come anyway. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighborhood car wash that gives a free wash after five paid ones. Model answer: "A sales promotion is a short-term reward that gets a customer to come back, like a free wash after five paid ones. The free wash is free for the driver, but the car wash still pays for the soap, the water, and the worker's time, and it gives up the money it would have charged. So the reward is a real cost the business has to plan for. It pays off only if it brings drivers back on days they would have skipped, and a made-up example like this one cannot tell you whether it will."

Use that pattern for your friend's dog-walking service, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your work. A reader should be able to rebuild every amount you report from the juice bar's planned sales, price, budget rate, and supply cost without guessing which numbers you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

the two answers, each with every step of the arithmetic shown and the interpretation the task names for that problem;
your message to the friend, explaining a sales promotion, answering the question about a free sixth walk, and naming one limit; and
a short list of the juice bar's figures, giving the planned revenue, the promotion budget, the revenue from the paid juices on one card, and the variable cost of all six juices on that card, so your amounts can be checked.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the juice bar's budget and its punch card with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the arithmetic, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a free spreadsheet to lay out the juice bar's figures. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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