Week 9 Discussion — Reward the Regulars or Reach New Buyers? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Hook

Every promotion dollar is a bet about people: who will come back, who has never heard of you, and which message they will believe. This week you learned that the promotional mix runs from advertising to sales promotion, that a punch card is a cost the budget must carry, that a channel is the path a product takes to the buyer, and that a promotion's claims must be specific, true, and supportable. None of those ideas makes a real choice for you.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: The illustrative coffee cart has a promotion budget of 3,000 dollars for the year, 4 percent of 75,000 dollars of planned revenue, and the budget is already inside its 12,000-drink break-even. Its punch card says buy nine, the tenth is free, and each free drink still uses 2 dollars of supplies and gives up a 5-dollar sale. Should the cart put most of the budget into rewarding its regulars with the punch card, or into reaching new buyers with social posts and a printed menu board? Take a side, name who gains and who gives something up, write one claim your promotion would make and say why it is specific, true, and supportable, and state the strongest case for the choice you did not make.

Option B: An illustrative family farm sells its vegetables at its own farm stand, a direct channel, and through a grocery co-op in town, an indirect channel. It has time to grow only one of them next season. Which channel should the farm grow? Take a side, name the intermediary the choice adds or skips, name who gains and who gives something up, and state the strongest case for the choice you did not make.

There is no single right answer. Two people can agree on every number in the case and still choose differently, because the choice rests on how they judge buyers and how they weigh the owner, the regulars, new customers, the co-op, and the people the business does not reach. The budget figures are facts about an illustrative case; whether a business should act on them is a judgment, and nothing here is legal advice or advice for any real business. Pick the option you actually care about, and make your case.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, say where most of the cart's 3,000-dollar budget should go, treat the punch card as a cost, name who gains and who gives something up, and write one claim your promotion would make with a sentence on why it is specific, true, and supportable; for Option B, say which channel the farm should grow, name the intermediary the choice adds or skips, and name who gains and who gives something up.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (marketing channel, intermediary, promotional mix, sales promotion, promotion budget) correctly.
• State the strongest case for a view you do not hold, in one or two sentences.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: name a stakeholder the poster left out, show where a post treats the punch card as free or mixes up a channel, test the poster's promotional claim against specific, true, and supportable, or make the strongest fair case for the choice the poster rejected. "Good post!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option A and think most of the cart's 3,000-dollar budget should go to reaching new buyers. The punch card is not free: every tenth drink still uses 2 dollars of supplies and gives up a 5-dollar sale, and many regulars might come every morning anyway. Office workers in the new building two blocks away have never heard of the cart, so a menu board and posts that say "Espresso drinks made to order, 5 dollars" could win them. That claim is specific and true, and anyone can check it. The owner and new customers gain; regulars give up a reward. The strongest case against me is that a regular who feels thanked tells friends, which reaches new buyers too. That is a judgment about how people behave, not a disagreement about the budget figures.

Notice how it uses the case's figures, reads the punch card as a cost, names specific groups, offers a claim that holds up, and states a fair case for the other side without calling it wrong. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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