The past several periods have seen an inflation in the United States, which will lead to our company needing to raise the prices of our products to cover our expenses. In addition, both of the brands will need to be aware of inflation rates, as well as other macroenvironmental influences such as political changes, globalization, and technological changes.
Lastly, both brands need to be aware of the microenvironmental influences. There are two key influences that we need to be pay attention to in future. First, we need to continue to keep an eye on the our advertising budget compared to our competitors because we do not want to raise our expenses if competitors advertising budget is down. Next, we need to be aware of the amount of promotional and volume discounts offered to our customers because we want to give our customers a better deal than our competitors.
As we continue into the future, we need to allocate our sales force better to insure a greater profit. We would continue to keep a high sales force in grocery stores because they have seen a 4.3% increase in sales. Also, we would allocate the same amount of sales force to mass merchandisers since they have been our best selling point since we began selling our product in period