In 2009-2010 Procter & Gamble's Old Spice brand had to respond to two important challenges. First, after a successful rebranding of the Glacial Falls scent into Swagger (see Kellogg Case #5-411-752), Old Spice's core brand team had to determine its next step in advertising. The options being considered included continuing to advertise Swagger, switching to advertising a different scent, advertising the umbrella brand, or placing an emphasis on body wash instead of on deodorant. This decision also involved proposing both the messaging and the media buy for the option selected. Second, in conjunction with this issue, the brand team had to decide whether the messaging of its advertising should respond to competitor Unilever's new advertising for Dove for Men, which would be kicked off in an upcoming Super Bowl spot. Students will step into the shoes of Mauricio O'Connell-one of the assistant brand managers of Old Spice-as he and his team brainstorm how to position the brand for another big success.

<p style="color: rgb(197, 183, 131);"><strong> AWARD WINNER - PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT CATEGORY - THE CASE CENTRE AWARDS AND COMPETITIONS</strong></p><br>An analyst for a money management firm is studying Apple Inc. as one of the firm’s key investments. In 2013, Apple had a market capitalization of nearly US$500 billion and sales of US$171 billion. According to the research firm, Gartner Group, it had the world’s best supply chain, ranking ahead of companies such as Walmart, Amazon and Inditex (Zara). As part of the analysis, a full review of Apple’s supply chain is required to look for insight into the future performance of the company in order to decide whether or not the analyst’s firm should continue to hold Apple shares.

An analyst for a money management firm is studying Apple Inc. as one of the firm's key investments. In 2013, Apple had a market capitalization of nearly US$500 billion and sales of US$171 billion. According to the research firm, Gartner Group, it had the world's best supply chain, ranking ahead of companies such as Walmart, Amazon and Inditex (Zara). As part of the analysis, a full review of Apple's supply chain is required to look for insight into the future performance of the company in order to decide whether or not the analyst's firm should continue to hold Apple shares.

This case considers the challenges, benefits, and costs of hospital participation in a widely recognized surgical quality improvement benchmarking program. The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP®) issues performance reports twice a year to participating hospitals, creating benchmarks based on data submitted by over 500 hospitals. NSQIP claims that participation reduces surgical complications. The protagonist, the Chief of General Surgery at a large academic medical center, faces skepticism about the value of the report on two fronts: from some surgeons on his staff and from a statistician he consults. Some of the hospital surgeons find the data difficult to interpret, and question their utility in focusing quality improvement interventions. The statistician has reservations about the validity of the statistical results as a basis for action. The chief must decide if and how the NSQIP report can be used to improve quality. In the coming era of value-based purchasing initiatives for hospitals, the chief also needs to be concerned about how payers might interpret this data as they develop payment systems that reflect available measures of surgical quality.

Thandeka Sisulu had just been hired as the new administrative director for the Eastern Cape Clinic, located in the outskirts of the South African city of East London. The Clinic had opened about 18 months ago with support from the government and from two anonymous donor groups. Those funds would soon run out and Thandeka faced the dual challenge of helping the Clinic become self-sufficient and dealing with the long wait times for patients to be seen. She knew that the budget for this year projected a loss, so she decided to better understand the financial problem first.

Thandeka Sisulu had just been hired as the new administrative director for the Eastern Cape Clinic, located in the outskirts of the South African city of East London. The Clinic had opened about 18 months ago with support from the government and from two anonymous donor groups. Those funds would soon run out and Thandeka faced the dual challenge of helping the Clinic become self-sufficient and dealing with the long wait times for patients to be seen. She knew that the budget for this year projected a loss, so she decided to better understand the financial problem first.

Thandeka Sisulu had just been hired as the new administrative director for the Eastern Cape Clinic, located in the outskirts of the South African city of East London. The Clinic had opened about 18 months ago with support from the government and from two anonymous donor groups. Those funds would soon run out and Thandeka faced the dual challenge of helping the Clinic become self-sufficient and dealing with the long wait times for patients to be seen. She knew that the budget for this year projected a loss, so she decided to better understand the financial problem first.

VUCA is an acronym that has recently found its way into the business lexicon. The components it refers to--volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity--are words that have been variously used to describe an environment which defies confident diagnosis and befuddles executives. In a 'VUCA world,' both pundits and executives have said, core activities essential to driving organizational performance--like strategic planning--are viewed as mere exercises in futility. VUCA conditions render useless any efforts to understand the future and to plan responses. When leaders are left with little to do other than wring their hands, organizational performance quickly falls at risk. In this installment of Organizational Performance, we demonstrate that by overlooking important differences in the conditions that volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity describe, we have disempowered leaders. We show how leaders can appreciate the differences among each of these challenging situations in order to properly allocate scarce resources to preserve and enhance organizational performance.

Regulatory bodies in the United States and the United Kingdom recently issued revised guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in marketing efforts. Of specific interest within these guidelines is the disclosure of a material connection when brand communications are sent within social media platforms such as Twitter. The findings of quantitative and qualitative survey data analysis indicate that consumers may be misled by current disclosure conventions. Managerial implications, policy recommendations, and suggestions for future research are presented in light of these findings.

In this Executive Digest, we make the case that aggregate individual expertise as a resource and intrinsic capability of the firm are hidden in plain sight, or worse, are assumed to exist where they do not. With high levels of complexity, business diversity, and number of geographical locations, the issue becomes even more acute. We propose strategic resource mapping (SRM) as a methodology designed to provide top managers with a rapid, comprehensive, and penetrating assessment of a firm's 'meta-capability': an actionable overview of the capabilities that exist within the firm. Based on multiple successful implementations, we describe the key features of SRM and provide several illustrations.

How do you get your organization to start using social technologies to become more innovative and productive? Where and with whom should you begin? We interviewed over 70 managers across 30 companies and found that the most successful firms employ one of three jumpstart strategies, depending on the organization's mission, work processes, culture, and industry. Some start at the bottom of the organization, finding and enabling 'young experimenters' to use social technologies to enhance their individual productivity. Others start in the middle, finding and helping 'corporate entrepreneurs' in middle management to use social technologies to improve collaboration on teams and projects. Others begin at the top, finding 'enlightened executives' who are open to new technology and the potential of social tools to strengthen their organizational culture. We combine our research with concepts from change management, technology adoption, and social networks to suggest ways managers can best introduce social collaboration tools into their organizations.

In this highly competitive century, social media offers both opportunities and challenges. The concept of social media is top of mind for many entrepreneurs today. Fans are assuming an increasingly active role in co-creating marketing content with companies and their respective brands. Based on the Xiaomi success story in China, we provide a framework for building the power of the fan base and propose a new fan-centric social media business model. We examine the best practice case study of an emerging company's successful efforts to leverage social media in order to reach an important audience of young consumers. Thereafter, we conclude with several lessons related to the integration of social media into a new firm's operation strategy. We strongly recommend that businesses, and especially startups, make good use of powerful social media to develop a business model with fan demand as the core. This is what we call the 'fan-centric' social media business model.

Growth is the biggest challenge for a luxury brand in that volume dilutes the brand cachet. In addition, it violates the credo of rarity on which the luxury sector is originally based. This article reveals how the current leading luxury brands use 'artification,' a process of transformation of nonart into art, to circumvent the volume problem. Artification takes time and substantial investment. It cannot be undertaken by the brands alone: It requires the active collaboration of art authorities and renowned artists. The goal is to change the status of the brand, of its founder and products, and in so doing, to reinforce the idea of a better-than-ordinary brand whose price and symbolic power are undisputed. It is also strategic for the globalization of luxury: Art is universal.

Given today's rapidly shifting global competitive conditions--including customer location, natural disasters, currency valuation, labor and transportation costs and availability--many U.S. companies are revisiting decisions about their preferred manufacturing location(s). The purpose of this research is to understand some of the trends that affect whether U.S.-based companies bring their production back to the United States or relocate it to different geographical locations (reshore). The focus is on the key factors that affect companies' manufacturing location decisions, the importance of these factors, and how the importance has changed over time. Because of the complexity involved in the manufacturing location decision, key risk factors inherent in the manufacturing decision are also assessed. Survey responses from 319 companies that currently manage offshore manufacturing plants are analyzed. Among other insights, this study found that 40% of these companies perceived a trend toward reshoring to the U.S. in their industries. The companies involved in this study also place an increasing importance on where their customers want them to locate, as well as how the location could help expand into new customer markets. These and further results and implications for U.S. manufacturing companies are presented herein.

The venues by which employees can voice satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and their experiences with the organization have traditionally been limited to internal communication systems that are orchestrated and sanctioned by the organization. However, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as blogs and instant messaging, now enable employees to deliver messages to hundreds or even thousands of people with a few keystrokes. . .messages that may or may not be desirable to or sanctioned by the organization. Under these circumstances, employee voice can be an untapped resource for enhancing the organization's public image or a bomb waiting to explode with devastating impact on the firm's reputation. Effective management of employee voice begins with understanding its purposes: contribution to management decision making, demonstration of partnership, articulation of individual dissatisfaction, and expression of collective bargaining. These expressions of voice can be guided and managed to a strategic advantage when organizations provide a proper organizational context along with the appropriate mechanisms for employees.

Few companies treat innovation in pricing as seriously as product innovation or business model innovation. However, after interviews with 50 executives and the analysis of pricing practices of 70 companies worldwide, our research suggests that innovation in pricing may be a company's most powerful--and, in many cases, least explored--source of competitive advantage. Innovation in pricing brings new-to-the-industry approaches to pricing strategies, to pricing tactics, and to the organization of pricing with the objective of increasing customer satisfaction and company profits; too many companies today see pricing as a win/lose proposition between themselves and their customers. Innovation in pricing breaks this deadlock and shows how to increase profits and customer satisfaction conjointly. As a result of our research, we present a canvas laying out more than 20 possible avenues for innovation in pricing, offering to any organization--regardless of size, industry, or nationality--a few key ideas on how to increase both profits and customer satisfaction.

This article investigates a social media-enabled, customer co-creation project that employs front-end innovation (FEI) at a well-known, large-scale food manufacturer. It sheds light on the role of social media technology in transforming the characteristics of FEI in terms of boundaries and knowledge distance. What type of exploratory or exploitative innovation ideas does a project of this sort enable? How did the project evolve? What lessons can be learned from this project? A longitudinal case study of Barilla was carried out through two rounds of interviews with marketing, business development and innovation, and digital communication managers. The evidence gathered highlights the emergent evolution of this customer co-creation project from an initial stage of idea exploitation to a more complex and fruitful stage in which both exploitation and exploration were simultaneously accomplished.

When managing organizational identity, great attention is often paid to external stakeholders while internal stakeholders receive far less consideration. However, organizational identity lives somewhat enigmatically at the intersection of the attitudes of all organizational stakeholders, not just those in the external environment. Moreover, employees are positioned to serve as either ambassadors of the organization or as liabilities depending on the way they speak about the organization to those both within and outside their workplace. Employees regularly discuss their work experiences with those outside the organization and frequently do so using social media, potentially reaching large audiences. This article describes the process through which everyday talk within the organization shapes its identity while wielding powerful effects on external perceptions. We highlight several common errors leaders make that promote negative everyday talk, along with suggestions on how to successfully manage identity through strategic communication and managerial processes. We also discuss the theoretical and pragmatic effects of everyday talk.

The case details the strategic decisions that SK Planet, a leader in web and mobile services in its home country of Korea, needed to make regarding the best way to carry out an aggressive global expansion-most importantly into the United States. The $1 billion company had a war chest of $600 million in cash, which allowed company leadership to consider three strategic options for evaluation: 1) Port or rebrand SK Planet's top-ranked Korean services to the U.S. A challenge with this option was that these platforms were developed largely for the Korean market and might not translate to U.S. audiences. Also, many of these services would face entrenched, direct competition within the U.S.; 2) Develop or expand organically, by way of chartering new SK Planet divisions under experienced Korean or American executives. The downside was that this would involve delays in getting new divisions off the ground, and the company needed to invest significant time and energy in researching the U.S. market; 3) Follow a Merger & Acquisitions strategy using its $600 million in cash. However, this would involve a high degree of risk, and if not managed carefully, mergers could lead to culture clashes between U.S. and Korean executives. Whichever option it chose, SK Planet set a three-year goal for its expansion efforts. While nominally short, the company saw this as the critical time frame before the smartphone ecosystem in the U.S. reached maturation and the incumbents fortified their market positions.

The payment processing industry in Europe had operated in largely the same way for decades. A standard system of financial processing and clearing ensured a steady profit pool for most of the players. However, the payments system in Europe was facing threats on a series of fronts, including changing regulation that shifted power away from some incumbents, lower prices, new competitors, and more demanding customers. One of the region's large players, Swiss-based SIX Payment Services, needed to decide how to respond to these threats.