For marketers, budget averages have long equaled spending power â€" or vulnerability. When budgets are below average, CMOs seek more funding. When budgets are above average, CFOs seek to tighten the belt. However, the authors argue that marketing-budget averages can be misleading. Here’s what they learned about how marketing budgets break down across several more-specific factors â€" and how to make better comparisons â€" through their analysis of data from The CMO Survey.

In the rush to develop vaccines, many strains of viruses are used in laboratories in an effort to help humanity. However, the same samples used to develop life-saving vaccines could potentially be used to develop weapons of biological warfare. This case looks at the scenario from multiple perspectives in an effort to discuss the ethics of virus usage, storage and regulatory oversight given the differing economical situations and motivations of the actors.

This note provides an overview of the evolving landscape of customer data privacy in 2023. It highlights two pivotal aspects that make privacy a central concern for businesses: building and maintaining customer trust and navigating the intricate regulatory environments. The note examines common privacy risks and their potential impacts on businesses, including reputational damage and compliance issues. It also offers insights into the differences between European and American regulatory practices. Furthermore, the note explores prevalent business practices related to data privacy and the challenges faced by industry professionals. It concludes by analyzing the perspectives of both consumers and regulators on privacy, identifying key challenges, and posing thought-provoking questions for further exploration in this digital age.

In January 2022, Stephanie Owens, the administrative leader at StateU, an LGBTQ+-welcoming university in the United States, participated in a kick-off meeting for the pronoun project as the project lead. The goal of the project was to develop a centralized system for collecting and disseminating the personal pronouns of StateU's students, staff, and faculty. The university embarked on the pronoun project to foster a community that recognized and celebrated the self-authorship of individual identities. It also saw personal pronoun data as useful to directing funding to initiatives that fostered justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. These goals were important for Owens, who had always been a champion of student success and an advocate for historically marginalized student communities.<br><br>At a pivotal moment after the kick-off meeting, tensions emerged around possible technical solutions: while members of the technical team supported a more efficient, secure, and reliable solution that would include a drop-down list of pronouns, the stakeholders on the team-many of whom worked directly with LGBTQ+ students, staff, and faculty and had lived experiences that had exposed them to the potentially harmful effects of predefining pronouns in a drop-down list-were strongly in favour of using a free-form text field for pronouns. Faced with escalating conflict, Owens asked both teams to prepare outlines of the advantages and disadvantages of their solutions and any other potential solutions. Owens was reviewing these materials as the next meeting approached. She had to weigh all arguments and decide for herself first: should StateU implement the drop-down list, the free-form text field, or the validation table solution?

In January 2019, Mohit Sehgal, assistant manager in the marketing team of Legrand India (Legrand), part of a global conglomerate in the electrical and digital infrastructure sector, had been asked to propose initiatives to enhance the brand's visibility and deepen stakeholder engagement based on the chosen brand platform: Advantage Legrand. The Legrand brand, present in India since 1996, represented a vast product portfolio and was connected to multiple stakeholders with diverse needs. It had successfully grown its business in India with a focus on customer-centricity, a heavy investment in research and development, and a focus on innovation and design. While Legrand was well-respected and strongly associated with premium, ethical products, brand awareness was limited, especially among end-consumers, and the brand was perceived as distant. The Advantage Legrand brand promise was initiated as a first step in increasing the brand's charisma. Legrand had also worked to enhance customer and stakeholder experiences, expanding brand touchpoints to include experience centres and virtual showrooms and working to deepen its engagement with end-users through social media campaigns. One year after the launch of Advantage Legrand, Sehgal needed to propose a brand-building strategy for the coming year and work out the implementation details. He was excited as he prepared for his upcoming presentation.

The digital transformation of China's residential services industry had been driven by changes in supply and demand, policy support, technology upgrades, and other factors. Ke Holdings Inc., a residential service platform, had explored a path of digital transformation through "vertical growth and horizontal connection". In terms of vertical growth, Beike had successfully remodeled the service process by breaking down the elements of "house-consumer-service provider" and creating value. In terms of horizontal connection, Beike had also shared its accumulated data with agents, store owners, brands, and the government to digitize the processes of home improvement, financing, relocation, and other residential services. In the future, a new round of digital transformation will accelerate the overall digitization of homes, people, and processes. Integrating cloud computing with software, algorithms, and hardware will become the underlying architecture for accelerating digital transformation of the industry. The deep exploration of AI + big data will bring more accurate and intelligent service demand matching. 5G and IoT technologies will consistently develop to form an entirely new service process. How would Beike use digitalization to better empower residential services? How would Beike use "new technology" to create or reshape interactive scenarios and industries?

University murders are not isolated brutal events. Fears ignited on campus compromise student learning and personal growth. When violence disrupts a campus, the integrity of education is violated. Anxieties and uncertainties brought by harassments and threats impair the welfare of faculty, staff, students, and their surrounding communities. This case traces intricacies and impacts of a graduate student's harassment and violent threats to faculty and staff for nearly a year. There is no intention to summarize all aspects of the analysts' report on which this case is based, including descriptions of 955 distinct events related directly to this murder. Rather, the objective of this case is to capture the evolution of information, judgments, decisions, and actions during a crisis, as well as the contextual impact of organizational culture and norms, and to provoke readers' insights and judgment regarding crisis management successes and failures.

Mr. Dharamdas Desai was running a distribution agency in Madhopura, a town in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India. He asked his son, Paresh, to analyze the business's financial situation. Paresh found that the business's post COVID compound annual growth rate was around 4 per cent and the operating profits had also declined. Paresh looked at the business situation and wanted to revamp the business strategically. Paresh came out with three alternatives to revive their business, Manik Distribution Agency: diversify into new product categories distribution; adopt a hybrid model (distribution and retailing of the products); and enter into the digital/e-commerce market. Paresh wanted to keep the business, so he needed further clarification.

In the rush to develop vaccines, many strains of viruses are used in laboratories in an effort to help humanity. However, the same samples used to develop life-saving vaccines could potentially be used to develop weapons of biological warfare. This case looks at the scenario from multiple perspectives in an effort to discuss the ethics of virus usage, storage and regulatory oversight given the differing economical situations and motivations of the actors.

China’s counterespionage laws open up foreign executives to the risk of being detained in the country in the event of a business dispute. It is increasingly common for foreign businesspeople to face an exit ban or commercial hostage situation as a result â€" which means companies doing business in China should prepare for such a possibility. This article explains how to develop a plan of action should such a situation arise.

Driven by the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO) and Government Technology Agency (GovTech), Singapore has embarked on the strategic transformation towards Smart Nation since 2014. The Smart Nation ambition envisioned Singapore as a mutually reinforcing triad of Digital Economy, Digital Government, and Digital Society, enabled by an extensive suite of smart nation-wide infrastructure. New townships would be designed and built smart, as they embrace an increasingly green future. Various global rankings of smart cities have often put Singapore in the top spot. What are the key factors that have contributed to its success? What are the key challenges it has encountered, and what should be the strategic next steps for Singapore?

Hong Kong-headquartered SenseTime Group Inc. (SenseTime) was founded in 2014 to commercialize artificial intelligence (AI) and was a global leader in deep-learning AI, with applications in Smart Business (facial recognition), Smart City (property damage and theft detection), Smart Life (interacting with the Internet of Things to improve consumer experience), and Smart Auto (autonomous driving). December 10, 2021, was supposed to be the date for setting the offer price for SenseTime shares in the company’s global initial public offering. Instead, it was the date that Xu Li, co-founder and chief executive officer of SenseTime, learned from Hong Kong Clearings and Exchange Ltd. that American President Joe Biden was about to designate SenseTime a Communist Chinese Military Company—an action that prevented American investors from legally investing in SenseTime, derailing the initial public offering. How should SenseTime alter its marketing, research and development, and listing strategies in the light of the American government’s actions? How would the increased tension affect the geographic, technological, and customer aspects of SenseTime’s efforts to drive business growth?

In February 2022, Café Niloufer, based in Hyderabad, India, was contemplating transforming its product lines of Irani tea, onion samosas, and Osmania biscuits, to grow its customer base over several other competitive brands. Anumula Shashank, Café Niloufer’s managing director, wanted to update the brand by strengthening their product portfolio to meet the needs of new-age consumers. Cafes/lounges that provided a variety of beverages were projected to propel the competition in the coming years. Shashank wanted to grow the café business. He had three alternatives: add the products to the existing product line, add a new product line, or open new retail outlets. Shashank also wondered what analysis process and decision criteria he should use to make his decision.

In this article, we highlight an increasingly important issue in the workplace: the dysfunctional divide between employees of different political affiliations that results in reduced trust and heightened conflict. We provide evidence that differences in political views are having an increasingly corrosive effect on trust, interpersonal relations, and the very ability of teams-at all levels and in many countries around the world-to achieve their missions and to reach their objectives. Drawing from data we collected from managers and professionals before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, we demonstrate the consequences of political polarization in the workplace and explain both how trust is built and how empathy has become an increasingly important factor in trust building among coworkers. Most importantly, we provide actionable strategies for team leaders as to how to effectively manage political polarization and increase trust among team members.

Whistleblowing is extraordinarily controversial because its occurrence is often reflective of fundamental failures in organizational governance, making leadership look bad. I argue that this perspective is shortsighted; rather, whistleblowing is a critical self-regulatory mechanism that, when properly actualized, protects asset value. I build on new research exploring a whistleblower orientation and integrate it with existing research on internal whistleblowing programs and whistleblowing cultures. Against this background, I present a novel, three-tier integrated program focused on promoting, supporting, and protecting a specific group of value-driven, highly moral-herein termed offended-whistleblowers to enhance firm self-regulation against fraud, sexual harassment, toxic cultures, and other malfeasances that occur both within firms and by their own actions. Whereas previous research has focused on organizational responses to whistleblowing, central to this program is identifying, nurturing, and supporting an idiosyncratic whistleblower orientation within key employees for a firm's own protection. The implication is that owners and managers can harness the power of whistleblowing, thereby protecting their firms, with less risk of individuals taking their grievances outside, where they could instead harm firms.

Technological advances and shifts in consumer preference continue to further the critical roles that digital platforms and online word-of-mouth play in organizational success. Within this context, a key concern is the growing proliferation of fake online reviews, which mislead consumers and damage businesses' reputations, resulting in additional platform maintenance expenditures to curb this problem. This article demonstrates that a successful avenue to turn these expenses into effective investments is to embrace a culture of transparency by effectively communicating the platforms' actions online. To this end, we first provide evidence of the danger posed by fake reviews. Using data from Amazon.com and ReviewMeta, we show that reviews suspected as fake and deleted by Amazon's algorithms are, counterintuitively, more likely to be perceived as helpful by consumers. In addition, two experiments reveal that including subtle messages into the review section of an online retailing website, messages that communicate a company's efforts to remove fake reviews, can successfully improve both perceptions of consumer helpfulness and purchase intention. Finally, a four-stage framework, VIEW-verify, inform, explore, and watch-provides a roadmap for managers of online review platforms to combat the problem of fake reviews.

This case tells the story of Included Health, a U.S. health care venture born from the unification of a major virtual care provider and two health care navigation platforms. The company's overarching mission is to raise the standard of health care for everyone by becoming a single source where all of a patient's services are provided - such that the patient is fully supported physically and financially. As of late 2023, it served tens of millions of individual members across America, counting as clients 32 of the Fortune 100 companies. We enter the case almost three years since the merger of the health navigation platform that Included Health's CEO Owen Tripp first founded, Grand Rounds, and the virtual care provider Doctor On Demand. He and Dr. Ami Parekh, the chief health officer, are at a crossroads. As the case describes their options for strategic direction going forward, Included Health becomes a window into several important industry themes: rethinking future models of in-person care, government regulation of virtual care after its boom during the COVID-19 pandemic, opportunities and challenges of incorporating AI, the increasing "consumerism" in health care, the primary care doctor shortage, and more.

The case highlights the courage, tenacity, and drive of a young woman pursuing her law degree part-time while working full-time in a financial role in Maryland. She applied to a posting for a government relations role in her parent company’s head office in Washington, D.C. The job involved advocacy work with members of the US Congress, which aligned with her interests even though it was intended for candidates several levels above her current role. However, given her interest in the opportunity, she reached out directly to the hiring executive, bypassing her manager and circumventing her organization’s standard human resources processes and protocols. She left the call with a request for an interview, although she thought that it could result in either a rapid climb or a painful fall from grace with reputational risk, which could impact her future career. Time would soon tell.