The chief executive officer of the jewellery division at Titan Company Ltd. withdrew two successive advertising campaigns for jewellery brand Tanishq during its high selling festive season in 2020 due to intense social media trolling. These adverse social media reactions, shaped by religious beliefs and ideology, challenged the well-entrenched “progressive and bold” positioning of the brand. With multiple stakeholders and shifting societal ideologies, should the company continue promoting its progressive image and bold creative executions irrespective of the recent setbacks, continue with the current positioning with significantly toned-down executions, or reposition the brand and its creative execution completely?
In this two-part case, in case A, a non-binary entrepreneur founded New FRDM Bodywear Ltd. (NEW FRDM) in 2015 in Toronto, Canada. The apparel and accessories company produced underwear for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals. While growing their business as a sole proprietorship, the founder sought out a mentorship opportunity through ACME Entrepreneurship Incorporated but was concerned about a request to censor NEW FRDM’s website and messaging content. The founder had to decide whether to stray from NEW FRDM’s original business model and accept the opportunity. In case B, over a year later, the entrepreneur was presented with new potential mentorship opportunities from three different programs. Build Your Best focused on female entrepreneurs and offered a permanent workspace and prestigious contacts in the industry. Womentrepreneur Network seemed to offer superior mentorship, non-financial resources, and promising events, but it seemed to be explicitly intended for people who identified as women. Out and Proud! offered one-on-one mentorship and large events and was explicitly focused on LGBTQ2+ businesspeople. The founder again faced the issue of having to change or abandon NEW FRDM’s business model to take advantage of one or more of these significant business opportunities.
In The ClearZone (ClearZone), founded in 2020 by Jenessa and Madison Olson, was a sanitization service start-up that used ozone technology to disinfect commercial and residential spaces. The sisters started ClearZone when their existing business, STMNT, a successful online clothing rental business, was put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noticing a heightened need for disinfectant services in response to the pandemic, the sisters took the opportunity to use their business skills, build on their concerns for environmental sustainability, and support clients attempting to create safe environments. ClearZone experienced exponential growth and was now considering its next step in expanding the business.
In 2004, Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba created Alipay, an app to facilitate payments on its e-commerce sites. As Alibaba grew, so did Alipay, until Alipay spawned its own ecosystem of financial technology products and services under the name of Ant Group. By 2020, Ant had one billion users on its platform, which offered investment opportunities, consumer lending, and insurance, targeted towards middle class individuals and small- and medium-sized businesses. In November 2020, Ant Group was poised for its initial public offering (IPO). But the Chinese government canceled the IPO just days before Ant was expected to raise $34 billion at a valuation of $310 billion. Regulators were concerned that Ant's partners were bearing too much risk and they fretted that the Chinese economy showed signs of rising consumer spending. What was next for Ant Group?
Philips India is a leading player in the air-treatment products market in the country. Philips India's launch of the New Urban Living Series air purifiers aligns with the company's continued focus on enhancing people's health by leveraging technology to promote healthy living and prevention. The case describes how, given the challenges in the residential consumer segment, Philips India intends to back its competitive strategy logic of entering the air purifier market and leverage its brand equity in healthcare to differentiate itself from its rivals and overcome the hurdles it is likely to encounter in a nascent but overcrowded market.
This field-based case uses the 66°North Company, an iconic Icelandic designer and manufacturer of premium outerwear, to unfold circumstances that allow for an analysis of the firm's value proposition, competitive position, and growth opportunities. The 66°North brand image was believed to be an important contributor to its success over the years. Outside Nordic countries, 66°North had grown since 2013, especially following its shift to develop direct-to-consumer channels, but still remained a small niche brand relative to several more widely recognized competitors. While in Iceland it was standard household gear, its market penetration in large global markets such as the United States remained low. This leaves the case open to exploring the uncertainty over the achievable and costly attempt to gain greater visibility in the US market. What was the brand positioning internationally? And what was the go-to market?
The game of baseball offers a team's manager relatively few tactical decisions to affect their team's chances of winning on any given day. The manager chooses the batting lineup and where the fielders are positioned; the pitchers who start the game and appear in relief, and to some extent what pitches are thrown; and if or when to attempt a stolen base or sacrifice bunt. Those decisions comprise all the levers in baseball a manager can pull to gain an advantage. Given this, the question facing baseball managers is how to optimize this limited set of decisions such that they maximize their team's odds of winning as many games as possible. In this exercise, student will measure how one of the strategic decisions a manager can make-whether to sacrifice bunt or not-affects runs generated or lost.
In this two-part case, in case A, a non-binary entrepreneur founded New FRDM Bodywear Ltd. (NEW FRDM) in 2015 in Toronto, Canada. The apparel and accessories company produced underwear for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals. While growing their business as a sole proprietorship, the founder sought out a mentorship opportunity through ACME Entrepreneurship Incorporated but was concerned about a request to censor NEW FRDM's website and messaging content. The founder had to decide whether to stray from NEW FRDM's original business model and accept the opportunity. In case B, over a year later, the entrepreneur was presented with new potential mentorship opportunities from three different programs. Build Your Best focused on female entrepreneurs and offered a permanent workspace and prestigious contacts in the industry. Womentrepreneur Network seemed to offer superior mentorship, non-financial resources, and promising events, but it seemed to be explicitly intended for people who identified as women. Out and Proud! offered one-on-one mentorship and large events and was explicitly focused on LGBTQ2+ businesspeople. The founder again faced the issue of having to change or abandon NEW FRDM's business model to take advantage of one or more of these significant business opportunities.
In The ClearZone (ClearZone), founded in 2020 by Jenessa and Madison Olson, was a sanitization service start-up that used ozone technology to disinfect commercial and residential spaces. The sisters started ClearZone when their existing business, STMNT, a successful online clothing rental business, was put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noticing a heightened need for disinfectant services in response to the pandemic, the sisters took the opportunity to use their business skills, build on their concerns for environmental sustainability, and support clients attempting to create safe environments. ClearZone experienced exponential growth and was now considering its next step in expanding the business.
It was 2019, and the senior manager of strategy and business operations at Lyft Inc. (Lyft), headquartered in San Francisco, had been tasked with helping the company expand its existing vehicle services infrastructure to include individual riders, also known as end users, in addition to drivers. She had information about the competitive landscape within the industry, along with valuable insights from interviews Lyft had facilitated with potential customers. She was aware that in order for Lyft to grow and ultimately scale in as frictionless a manner as possible, the company might have to re-evaluate its value proposition and figure out how to build trust with consumers.
In 2020, the Chilean government wants to promote green hydrogen, a technology with high potential to help mitigate climate change. President Sebastián Piñera, aware of the country's advantages to produce green hydrogen competitively, asks Energy Minister Juan Carlos Jobet to elaborate a mission-oriented strategy to promote the technology. The strategy was to match the government's center-right orientation and the country's political and economic trajectory. Chile was often praised for its strong macroeconomic fundamentals and a sound policy framework. However, the country was facing social and economic disruptions given the Covid-19 pandemic, which added pressure to an already difficult political backdrop. Chile still struggled with unprecedented political uncertainty after social unrest in 2019 led to a wave of protests that forced the government to agree to a constitutional reform and greater social spending.
In September 2020, Diana Ferguson was nearing her first Audit Committee meeting as the newly appointed Audit Committee chair of Mattel, Inc. Mattel was just recovering from an accounting scandal which had revealed the company's poor internal controls and weak board oversight over financial reporting, and the committee had important decisions to make going forward. In early 2018, Mattel's Tax team had discovered a significant reporting error in its third-quarter financial results. In consultation with Mattel's independent auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Mattel's finance team opted not to issue a correction and instead (effectively) concealed this mistake. This cover-up came to light in 2019, when an anonymous whistleblower reported the incident, setting off a chain of negative press coverage and senior-level resignations. Mattel responded by conducting an internal investigation, and concluded that, while their accounting processes needed to be improved, there was no evidence of fraud. Despite this, this issue had resurfaced in early 2020 when the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched a fresh investigation into the accounting error and subsequent cover-up. In light of these events, Ferguson and the Audit Committee faced a challenging road ahead with several important issues to consider. They needed to tackle Mattel's problematic governance and internal controls, and restore investor confidence in the company's financial disclosures. They also needed to review their earlier decision to continue to engage PwC as Mattel's auditor going forward.
In June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the vice-president of sales and marketing at Priority Management, a hotel and resort management company, was overseeing the operations of two hotels. New England Hotel was a large corporate hotel that had successfully cultivated much of its business from corporations in the nearby corporate business park. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, hotel occupancy plummeted, and the hotel’s general manager was resisting changing strategy to address heightened fears amid uncertainty from the hotel’s staff. A “business as usual” strategy would inevitably result in the hotel closing and all staff members being laid off. Midwest Hotel was a major branded full-service hotel located outside the downtown area. The hotel had undergone several changes in leadership and rebranding, which the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated. The hotel manager was forced to drastically reduce the hotel’s staff and implement a new strategy before the hotel became unsavable.