Marketing Tools At Work Essay, Research Paper

Juice Stop : Marketing Tools at Work

The Juice Stop is a small local franchise of a large national network of stores. Juice Stop specializes in twenty four ounce, custom made frozen smoothies, fresh juices and healthy snacks . Juice Stop customizes their blends exactly to the customers’ tastes. The Juice Stop is a quality driven place. The quality of the product is what makes the Juice Stop experience memorable. The non-fat yogurts and sherberts are made especially for the Juice Stop from the brand leader in frozen dessert’s Edy’s Ice Cream. juice stop has also refined their juice formulations by continually meeting with their growers to ensure only the most succulent fruits are picked to ensure a natural high quality product.

The Juice Stop employed four main areas of marketing to help increase sales. They were: advertising, promotions, philanthropy, and publicity. In fall of 1998 the Juice Stop was a business that was losing money. The brake even point was around five hundred and thirty dollars a day to recoup operating costs. Unfortunately the Juice Stop was only making around four hundred and twenty-five dollars a day, and therefore losing money. December of 1998 saw a management change and with it a change in the way marketing was handled. What resulted was seven hundred and ten dollar average sales per day. A simple change in strategy resulted in a highly profitable business. The most important thing to consider is the target market of our products. The market for the Juice Stop is fairly wide. The location of the corner of 13th street and University Drive across from the University of Florida make it ideal to target foot traffic from the university, including both faculty and students. Other targets are the athletic and health conscious, as well as the local non-student population around Gainesville. The local non-student market is important because in the summer the amount of students goes down by seventy-five percent. Those making the local population important for summer profits.

Advertising dollars for a small business are limited and so choosing where and when to advertise are important strategic decisions. One of the first and most important places to advertise in Gainesville is the Alligator. The Alligator is the most read newspaper in Gainesville, and there target audience is almost exclusively the University of Florida student body, which is the same target audience as the Juice Stop, thus it is a highly effective advertising tool. The Juice Stop chose to run a small two inch by two inch ad three times a week in the Alligator for ten weeks at the beginning of the spring semester. Even though the ad was small , because of the large readership business seemed to pick up as a result. (See visual aid number 1).

The Juice Stop also chose to advertise in a local lifestyle magazine called Moon. Moon reaches the same target audience but is more focused on alternative lifestyles i.e. vegetarians and vegans (people who don’t eat any animal products such as milk or eggs in addition to meat). Which makes the Juice Stop a great place for them to go. The ads in Moon were large half page ads and also included a coupon in the ad. The response we got from the ad

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was measured in part by how many coupons we received back. The number was quite large, again proving the ad and strategy behind it was a success. (See visual aid number 3).

A third innovative advertising attempt was made on the cutting edge of the world wide web. The Juice Stop bought a banner on a web page called collegestudent.com. This web page was designed for college students, with chat rooms ,post boards and even personals specific to each college. According to studies the average college student spends 3.2 hours online each day, to write reports or check e-mail or even just to surf the Internet. The cheap cost of the banner was another reason for choosing this site. The site charged by how many hits that page got. as a result you are only paying for people who see the site and the ad. The web page also printed five hundred tee shirts with our logo on the back and distributed them on campus for free.

The fourth and final advertising attempt by the Juice Stop was a half page ad in the program of a play that ran from January 15th to the 31st. The half page ad cost only fifty dollars and was distributed in the program for two shows nightly at the Student Center. The play had six sold out shows and all in all the total attendance was estimated at over nineteen hundred people, all for only fifty dollars.

Promotions also play a large role in the Juice Stop’s marketing campaign to increase sales. These promotions would be defined as interactive between the Juice Stop and their clients, not just advertising. Juice stops’ promotion’s include the Student Advantage card, Gator Greenbacks, Juice Stop Dollars, Juice cards, and sponsorships.

The first promotion was the Student Advantage card, which is a card that is sold to the local student population for a set fee of twenty dollars and provides them with discounts at over thirty local business’ for the rest of the year. The program is free to participate in for the business except of course for the discount. The discount offered by the Juice Stop was buy one smoothie get the second half off. This promotion increased sales and did not affect profit because the students who came in had originally only intended to buy one smoothie, when they saw the Student advantage it persuaded them to buy two getting the second half off. While the profit margin was not that of the first one it was still quite generous, and made the customer feel like he had gotten a deal.

The second promotion run was a ad/coupon in the Gator Greenbacks. The Gator Greenbacks is a glossy well designed coupon book with over one-hundred and fifty pages that is given out free on the University of Florida campus. The ad cost two-hundred and sixty-nine dollars to run and included one fifty cents off coupon which could be used up to five times. the Gator Greenbacks book guaranteed a minimum twenty-five thousand copies to be distributed during the summer term and a minimum forty-two thousand copies in the fall of 1999.( See visual aid number 3).

The third promotion run was a combination one designed to target the local market for the up coming summer off season. In conjunction with a Civitan donation they agreed to give out Juice Stop dollars, which looked and were shaped like real dollar bills to be used like regular money at the Juice Stop. ( See visual aid number 4). The second part of this promotion was the Juice Card which was a discount card which resembled a credit card that was given out to local customers who came in repeatedly. Each time a person came in they received ten percent off their whole order just by showing the card. the card was given out only to local business people and faculty from the university, it was not given out to the student population. This was done to

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target the people who live in Gainesville to make them life long customers for many years to come. (See visual aid number 5).

The forth promotion used by the Juice Stop was setting up booths as sponsors at two local sporting events. Which included a local karate tournament that had two hundred and fifty competitor’s. Juice Stop had a half page ad in the tournament program and set up a booth at the actual tournament for four hours where they did one hundred and fifty dollars worth of business. The second local event was the NPC Central Florida Body building Championship. At this event we were allowed to set up a booth which did over two hundred and fifty dollars worth of sales. We also were given a full page ad in the program for a one hundred and fifty dollar sponsorship.(See attached ad.) Both these promotions were successful and more importantly they were directed at our specific market segment the health conscious and the athlete. The sales alone at each of these events covered our costs plus some, and then add on the exposure we got to our specific market, the promotion was a huge success.

Philanthropy was another important tool to market the company. The Juice Stop believes giving back to the community not only improves sales it helps others at the same time, making philanthropy one of the best tools of marketing. The center of the Juice Stop’s philanthropy is the Civitan Regional Blood Center. Juice Stop is an Ultimate Sponsor for which they donate twelve hundred dollars a year to the center. This donation is tax deductible because Civitan is recognized under sec 501.c of the IRS as a non-for-profit, charitable organization. And , in return the Juice Stop gets many benefits. Civitan has approximately eight to ten blood drives a week. The Juice Stop’s logo is on every t-shirt given out on the U.F. campus. (Approx. seven thousand a year). There banner is displayed outside the Civitan bus. A Juice Stop Smoothie Lineup Board is displayed on the bus during the blood drives. A coupon is given to every donor on campus. And the Juice Stop is mentioned in all media promotions on and around campus, including ads’ on WYKS-FM/Kiss 105.3 .

The Juice Stop’s other philanthropy endeavors include the Shower-a-thon, Greek Week ‘99, and the Alpha Chi Omega “Fun Run” . The shower-a-thon was a local roller hockey tournament put on by the brothers of Alpha Epislon Phi fraternity. All proceeds from the tournament benefited Stop Children’s Cancer , a division of the American Cancer Society. It took place on March 21, 1999, and the Juice Stop logo was placed on the event t-shirts for a simple donation of ten free smoothies. Greek Week ‘99 was a week long group of activities for Greek organizations which included three community service projects and the Greek Games which was an athletic competition. The Juice Stop Donated five gallons of fruit punch and received placing of their logo on the Greek week t-shirts. The Alpha Chi Omega “Fun Run” was a two mile run around Lake Alice that included the participation of five hundred runners. The Juice Stop offered a sponsorship of one hundred and fifty dollars which went towards the run’s charity the sexual and Physical Abuse Resource Center house located in Gainesville. This donation was also tax deductible. The Juice Stop also volunteered to help the College of Architecture by allowing two group’s of students to come in and study the space and analyze customer and staff circulation lighting , color, and design quality. The analysis was then reported back in a report to their professor.

Another kind of marketing is publicity. The Juice Stop has received only one instance of publicity in the last year. It was the painting of the mural on the building’s 13th Street

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side wall. The wall was bear since the opening of the Juice Stop, until the coordinator for the Girls Club of Alachua County Inc, started a mural contest. The contest’s theme was ” Colors of the World”. local artist Patrick Boner’s entry won, and he painted the mural in August and September of 1998. The Alligator newspaper ran a half page story on the mural in a Monday issue. (See attached copy).

That concludes my analysis of the Juice Stop’s marketing strategy over the last six months. By advertising in high circulation outlets and by targeting a specific market segment the Juice stop was able to recover from a bad sales trend and rose to become a very profitable business.

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