In 2009, Lee O'Rourke was promoted to District Vice President in charge of Macy's newly created North Florida district. This district consisted of 11 stores located in the greater Orlando area and in the east coast towns of Daytona, Melbourne, Merritt Island, and Vero Beach. The performance of these stores had lagged in recent years, and O'Rourke was charged with building a cross-functional district team to support these stores and with improving their overall performance. O'Rourke and her team were able to drive almost immediate improvement in the district's sales growth and profitability and in other key areas such as customer service scores. How can O'Rourke ensure that these stores continue to perform well going forward?
Spotify is an on-demand music streaming service founded in Sweden in 2006, in a music industry in crisis. It offers online music consumers legal access to a repertoire of over 30 million pieces of music, which varies by country. Its mission is to let people listen to the music they want, when they want and where they want. To accomplish this, the company offers a legal alternative that is superior to piracy, via a simple, clear and rapid platform, making listening to and sharing music easier than ever. Its service falls within the freemium model: users can access it free in exchange for being exposed to ads a few minutes every hour or pay a small monthly fee to access it without ads, without interruptions and with a certain number of benefits in terms of the quality and accessibility of music. Spotify has seen meteoric growth since it was founded: it has a presence in 58 countries and has 75 million users, 20 million of whom are paying subscribers. Despite this, the company has not yet turned a profit. Plus the compensation it pays to rights holders for the use of their music has been criticized as being insufficient. However, this problem is not exclusive to Spotify; it affects most businesses that try to monetize music.
ABB India, the Indian subsidiary of ABB Global, has been lagging behind the parent company's other subsidiaries in terms of its percentage of female employees. To rectify the gender imbalance, the parent company has assigned the head of Diversity and Inclusion for India, the Middle East and Africa with the task of introducing and rolling out diversity and inclusion initiatives at ABB India. In June 2014, the chairperson of ABB has scheduled a visit to India and is looking forward to reviewing the status and progress of the diversity and inclusion program.
A young analyst decides to collect Twitter data to better understand who is promoting the Net Promoter matrix on the social media site in late July 2015. How widely is the metric mentioned and how much of the dialogue involves conversations rather than tweets being sent as general broadcast messages? He considers the social network of these users, their relationships and the network as a whole to create a network graph and wonders what he can do to improve the way it can be viewed and understood.
ABB India, the Indian subsidiary of ABB Global, has been lagging behind the parent company’s other subsidiaries in terms of its percentage of female employees. To rectify the gender imbalance, the parent company has assigned the head of Diversity and Inclusion for India, the Middle East and Africa with the task of introducing and rolling out diversity and inclusion initiatives at ABB India. In June 2014, the chairperson of ABB has scheduled a visit to India and is looking forward to reviewing the status and progress of the diversity and inclusion program.
A young analyst decides to collect Twitter data to better understand who is promoting the Net Promoter matrix on the social media site in late July 2015. How widely is the metric mentioned and how much of the dialogue involves conversations rather than tweets being sent as general broadcast messages? He considers the social network of these users, their relationships and the network as a whole to create a network graph and wonders what he can do to improve the way it can be viewed and understood.
In a December 1, 2013, interview on American television program 60 Minutes, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon would soon change the future of online shopping by enabling customers to receive items within thirty minutes of ordering. This delivery service, Bezos said, would be powered by unmanned autonomous drones and could be offered as soon as 2015. The market reaction was instantaneous and positive. Still, Amazon needed some answers before it could launch autonomous delivery services: Were customers ready to embrace and pay for this type of delivery service? Would regulators allow it? Should Amazon make or buy its drones? Would it be too risky for Amazon to wait to launch this service? If it decided to go ahead, how should it launch, and to whom?
Achal Industries was a 40-year-old proprietary family enterprise engaged in cashew processing and export. Giridhar Prabhu, 57, was Achal's second generation entrepreneur and managed its operations in the Indian states of Karnataka and Maharashtra. He had been in this labor intensive business for close to three decades. Family owned businesses and private partnership firms dominated this sector. The cashew processing industry was facing severe constraints due to high employee turnover and a labor shortage. Many enterprises had started exploring the option of automating cashew processing at their factories. Giridhar had also been studying and analyzing this option. He anticipated that, five years hence, automation would prove more economical than labor-intensive cashew processing. His own plan was to retire from the business in five years, but to his disappointment, he found that none of his three daughters was interested in running the business. Giridhar felt he would not have the ability to manage a new, profitable automated factory, which would demand quite an effort, as he got older. Lack of support from the family would add to that burden. In November 2014, he was contemplating future options that included selling his business, expanding the business and inducting professional non-family members to steer the enterprise's future. The dilemma before him was to choose the option that would be best for him, his enterprise and his family.
The patient affairs coordinator is concerned about the rising number of complaints regarding the level of services offered by the transportation teams in the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC). The center's management team is determined to create an exemplary patient transportation service at AUBMC and consequently launches an investigation supported by a full-scale study to determine better ways of re-engineering these processes. The coordinator must consider the factors that contribute to patient and staff complaints as well as the types of data and tests required to provide evidence-based solutions for patient transportation in the hospital.
In July 2014, the expatriate CEO of McDonald's Japan (MDJ) faced a crisis after a video was broadcast accusing one of the company's China-based food suppliers of serious health and sanitation violations. Although MDJ was the biggest brand in Japan's fast food industry, the company's sales had been falling since 2008, and its profitability had deteriorated dramatically since 2012. The CEO, who had recently taken over at MDJ, urgently needed to turn around the company's situation and deal with the crisis at hand. How could she reassure Japanese consumers and put the company back on the road to growth?
This case is a supplement to W15400. In February 2015, the sales of McDonald's Japan had continued to slide, despite the implementation of new pricing and the introduction of new food items. The company posted a loss for 2014, citing costs in dealing with the Shanghai Husi debacle and the impact it had on sales. However, numerous reports of foreign objects in McDonald's food items had resulted in the loss of consumers' trust. How should the expatriate CEO rebuild the company's position in the Japanese market?
In 2014, clothing retailer Gap Inc. rolled out a new performance management process for headquarters staff that did away with a traditional rating and ranking system. The new process involved informal monthly meetings between managers and their reports, and it more closely tied bonuses to business performance. Would it serve to motivate employees? Could its framework be used in Gap Inc.'s thousands of stores?
Core Curriculum Readings in Marketing cover fundamental concepts, theories, and frameworks in marketing. For classroom use in higher education, this Reading is accompanied by a Teaching Note, test bank, and exhibit slides. Digital technology has changed how consumers search for information, buy products and services, and interact with companies and each other. These technologies also have made it possible for companies to have a better understanding of their customers' decision journey and subsequent word-of-mouth recommendations. Digital marketing requires new approaches to reach and engage consumers. This reading highlights four key elements of digital marketing: outbound marketing (search advertising, display ads, and video ads), inbound marketing, social media networks, and mobile technology. The Reading explores each element, explaining relevant tools and how to assess their effectiveness.It also covers advanced topics such as online-offline interaction, managing search ads and bidding for keywords, assessing the effectiveness of digital campaigns, and linking measurements to customer lifetime value (CLV). This Reading contains an Interactive Illustration, "Search and Display Advertising ROI," which helps students understand the relationships among measures of efficiency of search and display advertising, as well as the dependence of advertising campaign profit and ROI (return on investment) on its measures of efficiency. The Reading also contains links to four video clips on the implementation of digital marketing techniques, including "Coca Cola Hong Kong Multiscreen Ad Campaign," a creative combination of TV and mobile marketing; "HubSpot CEO Interview on Inbound Marketing," about the importance of creating noteworthy content that will attract customers; "United Breaks Guitars," an example of negative word of mouth via social media; and "Advertising Symbiosis: The Key to Viral Videos," describing why certain customers are likely to share ads.
The prospect of online grocery (e-grocery) shopping has generated a substantial amount of interest. Many fast-moving consumer goods companies have entered this potential market, and Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) is contemplating building its own e-grocery platform. However, e-grocery firms have yet to develop a business model that can consistently deliver profits while also creating value for customers. HUL needs to assess the potential barriers to success, including challenges such as inadequate infrastructure and customer skepticism. If the company decides to launch its e-grocery store, which model should it follow? Should HUL enter the e-grocery arena with a full range of products or only a select few? What technical and physical capabilities would the company need to succeed in the online retailing business? HUL has always been at the forefront of using technology to reach consumers, but is e-commerce the best way forward?
A middle-aged investor, living in India, is looking for a pension plan as he wants to retire within 10 to 12 years and start his own consultancy. His financial advisor suggests four investment plans, each a mix of equities and bonds with different risk elements. An investment that has more equity also has more risk but higher returns. Inflation, equity markets, bond trends, interest rates, portfolio returns and likely annuities all have to be analyzed. Annual contributions and the accumulation of a corpus fund at the time of maturity also have to be considered. The investor wants to ensure that his pension plan will generate the annuities required to support his retirement but is still unsure which plan to choose.
In identifying high-potential employees and leaders, the HR world tends to prefer “all-rounders,” meaning individuals who score well across a range of competencies deemed necessary to lead and grow businesses. As a result, many HR departments focus executive development plans on individuals with limited weaknesses — weaknesses that can be fairly easily “rounded off” or trained away. The logic behind this appears sound. But this reasoning can eliminate leadership candidates with one or two significant soft spots even when they are outsized talents in other areas. And that’s not something that everyone on the executive floor accepts. Indeed, to many members of the C-suite, clear gaps in competencies are seen as the price that must be paid for an individual’s clear strengths — especially when those strengths are in areas that drive business performance. <br><br> An emerging body of evidence suggests that managers who are exceptional in key areas and weak in others have a much greater impact on corporate performance than individuals who are exceptionally well rounded. While more work needs to be done in this area, the existing work indicates that having an executive team with some distinct capability “spikes” rather than smooth across-the-board capabilities can make a significant difference to business performance. Thus, when selecting leaders, the HR world should not discount individuals with a distinctly uneven capability profile, especially when those distinctive capabilities are likely to be key performance drivers. In other words, mind the spikes, don’t mind the gaps.