In September 2014, the co-founder and director of Treks `n Rapids, a leading adventure sports tourism company in New Delhi, India, needs to re-evaluate the company strategy. The adventure sports tourism industry has tremendous potential for growth in India, largely due to the number of young professionals with disposable incomes and a desire for new experiences, and is witnessing increased demand from a variety of profitable customer segments, both domestic and foreign, corporate and individual. However, the industry suffers from various problems such as poor infrastructure, the country's negative image in the minds of customers (especially with regard to safety and quality) and a string of natural disasters. Should the company focus on its currently profitable local corporate sector or diversify into other areas and other types of tourism?
Most leaders are so overworked that they have few resources left with which to energize their teams. And yet, as Peter Drucker noted, the foremost job of a leader is to “take charge of your own energy and then help orchestrate the energy of those around you.” This article uses science to explain why trust is an effective means to improve performance. It then shows how trust can be measured and provides an action plan to build and increase workplace trust. Dr. Zak’s lab discovered in 2004 that the brain chemical oxytocin allows us to determine who to trust. The mathematical models he has built to understand how trust affects economic behaviours reveal that trust accelerates transactions such as investments in factories and equipment. It does this by reducing transaction costs associated with distrust. When there is increased trust between trading partners, there are fewer delays and more deals occur. Conveniently, the eight factors that create a culture of organizational trust — Ovation, eXpectation, Yield, Transfer, Openness, Caring, Invest and Natural — have an easy-to-remember acronym: OXYTOCIN. <br><br> To increase trust in their organizations, leaders should: 1. View employees as volunteers, who continue to show up only if they are engaged by the organization’s purpose. 2. Use joy at work as a measure of an effective culture. 3. Experiment by changing OXYTOCIN factors one at a time and measuring the effect on joy and productivity. 4. Invite co-workers to tangibly recognize each other weekly (see Ovation). 5. Communicate your organization’s transcendent purpose internally and externally via an engaging human-scale story that goes beyond increasing shareholder value.
The case describes Rubicon Global, a startup that aimed to disrupt the waste management industry. The company started with a bold idea: create a cloud-based, full-service waste management company providing low-cost, highly efficient, and environmentally friendly service anywhere in the country through a national network of independent waste haulers and recyclers. A player in the sharing economy, Rubicon was developing an on-demand mobile application that did for waste management what Uber had done for taxi service. Rubicon had made great progress since introducing its service. They had signed up large multi-national customers and had a number of large potential contracts in the negotiation phase. The team needed more capital to build out the network and technology platform. Management and the board had to make a number of critical decisions: how much should the company raise, for what purpose, from whom, and on what terms?
LTMRHL launched its Brand Ambassador campaign in Hyderabad on January 8, 2013 to bring about awareness and dispel negativity about the Metro Rail project. A two-year review in 2015 revealed that although many of the initial problems had been overcome, and negativity considerably reduced, the campaign had only achieved partial success. Based on the review, a decision had to be taken to continue or abandon the campaign after the scheduled commercial operations in July 2017. Will the current strategy be the gateway to success post commercial operations, mulled Sanjay Kapoor, General Manager & Head Corporate Communications (LTMRHL).
Yummy77 considers alternative operational models to reduce cost, improve speed, and increase appeal. Can one of these approaches succeed where others have failed?
This case is about Katherine Schuler, soon to become senior vice president of marketing at a fast-growing retail organization, Boxes & Bins (B&B). Part of Schuler's success has been due to her "fit" into a company with clear values and principles. In particular, B&B always put its employees first, and eschewed debt in order to grow only as the company could afford it. Several years ago, the founders sold most of their stock to a private-equity firm, the Weichel Group, which leveraged B&B heavily in order to accelerate the opening of more stores and to pay off the founders. Even after a recent IPO, the Weichel Group remained a major shareholder, and it urged B&B to hire two senior managers from large discount retailers to run operations and merchandising. Schuler's move into her new role could lead to her becoming B&B's president if she is successful. Schuler understands that B&B needs to grow, and wants to help it do so, but is uncertain about the plans for how that growth will occur. She wants B&B to acknowledge its key success factors to date because she believes that doing so will help it move to a new future. Yet she knows that changing B&B may be impossible-therefore, leaving might be her best option.
Upwork, the world's largest freelance talent platform, was the result of a merger between the two leading online freelancing companies in 2014, Elance and oDesk. After the merger, the company operated as Elance-oDesk and continued to manage two online platforms - Elance.com and oDesk.com - independently of one another. However in 2015 the company relaunched as Upwork, with both a new brand and a new platform. The company began to migrate Elance.com members and functionalities over to the new platform, which was based on the technical infrastructure of oDesk.com. This case helps students consider the challenges and opportunities associated with such a platform merger, from strategy to implementation.
A veteran of the freight forwarding industry, Issa Baluch wanted to transform the education space in Africa by introducing hands-on practical teaching in agriculture and agribusiness. In the summer of 2015 his vision of a practical learning institute for African agriculture workers had finally found its footing as the African Agribusiness Knowledge and Innovation Leadership Initiative (AKILI). Several African countries were interested in having AKILI branches; however, Baluch and his team were still working hard to design a concrete model for AKILI and figure out the best possible expansion strategy.
Abstract: Ricoh Canada Inc., headquartered in Toronto, Canada, is a fully owned subsidiary of Japanese technology giant Ricoh Company, Ltd. The case's core problem stems from the fact that the perpetual success of a business model based on selling and maintaining digital print solutions is coming to an end. Ricoh Canada Inc. is at the front lines of a company trying to change its appearance. For so long Ricoh has been known as the "printer guys," however, within three years the market that Ricoh Canada Inc. has so long relied on is going to contract. With strong cash flow from its legacy business Ricoh Canada Inc. must decide where to invest to ensure returns for the future; services such as IT support and document management seem to be the obvious answer, but the question of how Ricoh Canada should grow in these new markets is not so obvious
Global Thermostat (GT) is a high technology start-up has developed proprietary technology to help stabilize the global climate and close the carbon cycle through direct capture of carbon dioxide from the air. The case provides an opportunity to examine the impact of climate change on society, potential solutions to this complex challenge, and the growth of a start-up high technology company bringing disruptive technology to the marketplace. The case explores issues associated with disruptive technology-driven change in a large, highly successful industry with many powerful vested interests. It concludes with questions surrounding trade-offs between corporate versus social responsibility when addressing climate change. The case discusses challenges associated with growing a start-up high technology company including proof of concept, financing, scaling and globalization are highlighted, as are challenges related to successful navigation of the "technology hype cycle" and commercialization of what promises to be disruptive technology. The case also provides an overview of the energy and the clean technology industries, and their regulatory contexts. It discusses drivers and consequences of environmental degradation attributed to climate change. Motivations and objectives of the prominent co-founders; Graciela Chichilnisky, creator of the carbon market enshrined in the emissions treaty of the United Nations Kyoto Protocol; and Dr. Peter Eisenberger, a distinguished professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University with deep energy industry experience, and their executive team are explored.
In this article, we develop an understanding of native advertising, a growing new form of online advertising, which we define as desired marketing communications that appear in-stream. Current forms of native advertising can be considered in terms of their secrecy: how aware a consumer is of a native advertisement's source and intent. Based on existing research, we argue that less secretive native advertising will be more successful in the long run, and illustrate this using several cases. Finally, we detail important considerations for those marketers looking to capitalize on native advertising.
While scholars have explored the construct and ramifications of intellectual property, most research efforts have focused on patents as a means of protecting a firm's intellectual capital. Yet Hemphill (2004) suggested that trade secrets can affect the difference between economic success and failure of the firm. When trade secrets are discussed, there is a tendency to focus on the more famous secrets that have received considerable hype in the popular press (e.g., Coca-Cola, KFC, McDonald's). To address this shortage of trade secrets storytelling, the research reported here engaged in a historiographic approach to capturing and compiling an in-depth look at various company trade secrets and elaborating on the strategic intent behind many of the secrecy efforts. Product and process secrets were seen to be used to develop positive brand perceptions, establish consistent brand purchasing, aid in distinguishing products and services from competitive offerings, and build market share. We suggest that managers should regularly assess which assets are suitable for patent, product design, trademark, copyright, or trade secret status and work diligently to protect the firm's intangible assets.
In this article we introduce the Internet of Things to the broad managerial community and explore one of its central tensions: convenience vs. privacy and secrecy. We clarify the ways in which IoT differs from Web 2.0 and then highlight opportunities, challenges, and managerial guidance. In addition, we explore the prominent issue of privacy and secrecy. Due to substantial increases in amounts of consumer-related data and their accessibility as well as potential tradeoffs in benefits associated with IoT and in properties of humanness associated with the consumer experience, the managerial issue of privacy is elevated to a level never before realized-perhaps on par with, or worthy of inclusion as an element of, the classic marketing mix.
As surveillance technology advances and becomes more data rich and less intrusive and costly, brands collect vast quantities of customer data in order to gain customer insights to remain competitive. Brands conduct customer surveillance often without considering the consequences on customer relationships. Because of customer surveillance activities, customers may also experience privacy intrusions and turn to customer secrecy strategies that hide or disguise their data. To reduce this reaction, we propose a set of surveillance prompts to structure market intelligence databases to increase the efficiency of, and thus reduce the quantity of, customer surveillance activities while increasing data integrity and the potential value of customer insights. By discussing the need for brands to collect business and market intelligence, as well as detailing five types of customer data resources, we lay the groundwork for selecting potential customer data resources that best fit a brand's customer insight needs. We conclude with a discussion of two important considerations of a brand's customer surveillance strategy.
Firms' relationships with key stakeholders are increasingly threatened by privacy concerns. Given the role of firm corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in strengthening and enhancing these relationships, this article examines the intersection between privacy issues and CSR activities, and creates a framework for assessing privacy-related activities as an element of broader CSR strategy. Specifically, the present research considers a firm versus customer focus in privacy-related activities, as well as privacy-related activities in the form of business practices versus goods and services. We identify four areas of overlap between CSR and privacy. We highlight the potential opportunities to better manage privacy-related issues of stakeholders, and integrate these concerns into the broader CSR agenda.
Everyone keeps secrets, and organizations are no exception. The current literature on secrecy in organizations is centered on the managerial perspective of secrets as competitive resources. In contrast, this conceptual article takes a consumer-centric approach and presents a detailed explanation of why and how marketing secrets create value for consumers. First, a discussion of agency highlights three consumer roles in the marketing of secrets: Insiders, who know the secret; Aspirants, who know of the secret; and Outsiders, who do not know of the secret. Second, based on two mechanisms of awareness and primacy, a value chain of secrecy is proposed that presents four types of value that consumers can extract from secrets: acquisition value, acknowledgment value, leverage value, and dissemination value. Lastly, secrecy is revisited as a strategic marketing tool for creating value for consumers.