Informal Business Report: The Main Squeeze Lemonade Stand

The sun is a blazing hot ball of fire beating you down from the sky. People are hot, thirsty, and wishing there was a way to make the day a little cooler. The Main Squeeze Lemonade is just what the summer ordered! With a dream of beating the year-round heat from the sun and satisfying the thirst of Oahus residents and tourist, The Main Squeeze was established with a twist in the summer of 2016. The island of Oahu offers plenty of sights and adventures. At The Main Squeeze, we wanted to help those sightseers and adventurers feel refreshed and share the spirit of Aloha with them. We hope to bring aloha smiles, laughter, and love to everyone we meet, and we promote these ideas through a nice, cold cup of lemonade.

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Branding Strategy

The Main Squeeze lemonade is sold directly from our lemonade stands to consumers in sturdy, clear, recyclable cups, with crushed ice, lids and straws. Our brand mark, a man and woman lemon squeezing each other while laughing and smiling, and the company name under the mark appear on the cup. Our lemonade stands are currently located at major landmarks and sight-seeing locations across the island of Oahu, popular places for thirsty patrons. For example, you can find The Main Squeeze at the following convenient locations: Diamond Head State Monument, Manoa Falls, Kuliouou Ridge Hike, Makapuu Lighthouse Trail, and Waimano Pool Trail to name a few. According to Business in Action (2012) utility is the power of a good or service to satisfy a human need. The Main Squeeze ensures our lemonade stands are placed right where our consumers need them. Through proper placement of lemonade stands, and word of mouth promotion from satisfied customers, The Main Squeeze is on its way to achieving its mission.

Opportunities for New Locations

The Main Squeeze lemonade stand is doing quite well. It is time to consider expanding our operation to the other Hawaiian Islands. Business opportunities have sprouted over time with respect to our continued devotion in the marketing and quality provision of our services, and this will help us in the bid to expand to the other islands. Distributorship is one of the business opportunities that have arisen. It involves entering into an agreement with an independent agent/individual to deal in and to sell our lemonade on another island. The agent is not allowed to use our trade name The Main Squeeze as a part of his brand name. Such an agent has approached us to be our distributor in the islands of Kauai and Molokai. As part of our agreement, we intend to limit him to dealing with our product as opposed to giving him the freedom to advertise other competing products with our resources.

Rack Jobber is another business opportunity that will enable us to expand our business to new locations. This involves having an understanding with an agent to promote our product by using well-located store racks. Under this business opportunity, we intend to obtain strategic locations in the island Molokai in which the said racks will be placed on a consignment basis. The agent is then to manage our product inventory, do what is necessary to catch the attention of the consumers and take care of the bookkeeping. The store manager pays the agent depending on the sold merchandise.

Vending machines are a vital part of our expansion plan. The island of Lanai is further away and has strategic positions with high-foot traffic; perfect for vending machines for our product. In vending machine routes, the operator of the machine must pay a sales based percentage to the owner of the location.

Promotion Plans

Promotion involves utilizing an array of activities and events to stimulate or induce interest in a product or a product line (Bovee, 2016). Our first line of promotion is the point of sale display, as was indicated in the rack jobber business opportunity above. This will attract customers as they make decisions on what to buy. By using POP display, we will be both expanding our business and promoting the sales. The anticipated cost of this method is around $2,000 in the long run.

Word of mouth is another vital promotion tool that will help us reach to new customers. It involves satisfied customers telling others about it, and it can be a free promotion method. Getting our product into social media and using conversational marketing are also good promotion plans. Bovee (2016) defines conversational marketing as using networked communities to initiate conversations with potential buyers. The overall cost of all this in the long run is estimated at $5,000.

The final product promotion method we will adapt is specialty advertising. We will brand our company name on calendars, coffee mugs and pens and give these to loyal customers as gifts. This is sure work well with our word of mouth policy too. The associated cost is $3,000.

Employee Training

It is next to impossible to improve sales with demotivated staff and hence proper motivation methods need to be employed. The expectancy theory details one of the best ways to motivate employees. It relates the employees efforts and ability with the expected rewards and their attractiveness (Bovee, 2016). By extension then, encouraging the employees about their performances and rewarding employees who perform well will result in increased effort in selling lemonade. This will raise the sales once more.

The goal-setting theory suggests another good way of motivating employees; setting goals with them. The goals will have to be specific for clarity and should not be too easy to attain. We intent to install clear ownership of the set goals so as to cultivate ownership. Setting the goals and achieving them will help the employees belief in their ability.

Conclusion

The Main Squeeze has experienced tremendous growth in the last year. This growth and success is expected to increase should all the plans we have laid down be executed without any flaws. With the expansion plans underway, we expect to become very busy with the increasing business. We believe that our lemonade brand will grow and become a mainstay in the cold beverage industry among the Hawaii islands.

References

Bovee, C. L. (2016). Business in Action. Pearson Education Limited.