Twiga is a leading agricultural produce supplier in Kenya offering services to mostly informal retailers. Under Peter Njonjo, a co-founder and Twiga's new CEO, the company is considering multiple options for expanding its business, including offering packaged foods and services like insurance. Njonjo must also decide the ideal team and organizational structure for supporting Twiga's growth plans.
The case describes the champagne house Krug and their turnaround process. In the late '90s, the house had a troubling financial situation. After being acquired by the French conglomerate LVMH, and despite the efforts and investments, the house did not seem to recover and, by 2008, was once more suffering financial distress. In 2009, Margareth (Maggie) HenrÃquez arrived as CEO. Based on her previous turnaround expertise in larger firms, Krug seemed like a less challenging project. However, her first year at Krug, with continuous declining sales, proved that Krug's situation was more complicated than anticipated. The case allows a discussion of the real complexity in setting the strategic rationale of a turnaround. It describes the initial missteps and the search for guidance in the roots of the house, which brought Maggie on a journey of discovering the visionary approach of its founder, Joseph Krug. The case is rich in detail across all firm facets to allow a discussion on all the transformation measures taken and its rationale. It is well suited to a debate on strategy implementation. Likewise, it might also be appropriate to discuss the adjustment of the marketing policies for a turnaround. Lastly, the case emphasizes the role of Maggie as a transformational driving force - a woman from a different culture in a selective, and to a certain extent, conservative market. Her strategic approach and her decisive leadership in challenging traditional policies are also fundamental pillars of the transformation.
This case describes the evolution of MHFC, a player in the Indian informal housing sector. As a new entrant offering micro home loans to the financially excluded lower income families of urban India in 2008, MHFC had grown to an annual number of 18,000 loans worth INR 8 billion with an average ticket size of INR 0.43 million (USD 6,000). With a 53.5% purchasable equity stake in MHFC, Chopra and his team were left with certain decisions to make. Should the company on-board a new social investor? Or should it bring on the more readily available and capital-rich private equity investors interested in the lucrative prospects of the microfinance housing sector?
In April 2020, amid the global pandemic resulting from the spread of Covid-19, the president of the Broadway League, which represented theatre owners, producers, presenters, and general managers for Broadway and across North America, faced a challenge. On March 12, 2020, Broadway had suspended all plays and musicals. The president and her team needed to determine when Broadway might be able to reopen, what the Broadway League should be communicating to producers and guests, and what the reopening of Broadway would look like amid the global coronavirus pandemic. However, to reach these decisions, she first needed to determine the reliability of the recently released New York State antibody study and estimate the true prevalence of antibodies in the population.
On a cold Monday morning in January 2018, the founder and chief executive officer of dcs plus was sitting in a taxi on his way to catch a plane to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. In Dubai, he would be visiting the Middle East subsidiary of his company, a Romanian technology start-up focused on business-critical enterprise software for the travel industry. The one-year-old subsidiary, which was responsible for marketing, sales, and customer support in the Middle East region, had experienced performance problems and managerial issues since the start, leading to major changes in the local management team. The Romanian company was planning to open two new subsidiaries in São Paulo, Brazil and in Singapore, so it was important to avoid similar problems to those incurred in Dubai. The founder was reflecting on the dcs plus approach to internationalization for the overall organization, as well as how to manage a subsidiary.
Maliks, a major stationery retailer and provider of photocopy and printing services, had operated in Beirut, Lebanon, for over 25 years. The company's founder was considering the most suitable strategy for his goal of 100 branches by 2020. He was assessing the advantages and disadvantages of adopting the franchising business model as an expansion strategy and wondered what operational problems he would encounter. The Maliks management team was also assessing the viability of using the franchise model to expand beyond the greater Beirut area to achieve substantial growth. The company enjoyed strong brand-name recognition, but there were still many questions about the company's next steps, including whether the franchise business model was the most suitable strategy for Maliks. Did the company have the necessary resources and skilled management team to adequately monitor and support prospective franchisees? How would prospective franchisees be selected? What marketing and operational costs was the company likely to incur as a franchisor? Most importantly, did the Maliks management team have the required skills to effectively manage the franchise model?
Maliks, a major stationery retailer and provider of photocopy and printing services, had operated in Beirut, Lebanon, for over 25 years. The company’s founder was considering the most suitable strategy for his goal of 100 branches by 2020. He was assessing the advantages and disadvantages of adopting the franchising business model as an expansion strategy and wondered what operational problems he would encounter. The Maliks management team was also assessing the viability of using the franchise model to expand beyond the greater Beirut area to achieve substantial growth. The company enjoyed strong brand-name recognition, but there were still many questions about the company’s next steps, including whether the franchise business model was the most suitable strategy for Maliks. Did the company have the necessary resources and skilled management team to adequately monitor and support prospective franchisees? How would prospective franchisees be selected? What marketing and operational costs was the company likely to incur as a franchisor? Most importantly, did the Maliks management team have the required skills to effectively manage the franchise model?
In September 2014, a week before the UN Climate Summit, MSCI launched an innovative family of indices designed to allow investors to manage carbon risk in their portfolio. The MSCI Low Carbon Indices were developed at the request of, and with critical insight from two pension funds - AP4 of Sweden and FRR in France - which committed €2 billion, and Amundi, Europe's largest asset manager, which licensed the indices in order to offer low carbon funds (index mutual funds, ETFs) to other investors.
In June 2017, Barry Callebaut, the largest B2B cocoa and chocolate company in the world renewed its revolving credit facility (RCF) introducing a novel feature suggested by the Dutch bank ING: the margin on the RCF would be tied to the company's ESG score from Sustainalytics, a leading sustainability agency, as a way to "make sustainability truly pay". A year later, Barry Callebaut has made progress towards the ambitious environmental and social goals of its Forever Chocolate programme, yet its ESG score has fallen almost to the level where the margin on the RCF will increase.
This case provides students with an opportunity to analyze and define a desired positioning for Procter & Gamble's (P&G's) US employer brand. In addition to enabling students to actively engage in assessing and creating a brand positioning, this case gives students a rare opportunity to analyze the type of brand image data that brand managers use. Considered highly confidential, few cases enable students to see and interpret such data. Finally, this case provides insight into a type of branding-employer branding-for which there is little public information as it has only recently come into vogue.
This case provides students with a rare opportunity to understand the relationship between brand positioning design and delivery. While strategic challenges are often attractive to students, this case helps reinforce the importance and difficulty associated with implementing strategy effectively. In the A case (UVA-M-1004), students had to integrate consumer, competitor, company, and brand image data to arrive at a desired brand positioning. In this case, students must take their desired positioning strategy and activate it by redesigning the campus presentation provided to prospective employees. To do this, they will have to identify the strongest, most compelling way to use P&G's distinguishing attribute information to communicate the brand strategy through a PowerPoint presentation.
Derrick and Desmon Lewis were both successful professionals in the consulting and banking industries. They were born and raised in The Bronx, New York City's poorest borough. The Lewis brothers had always wanted to give back to the community. In 2016 they launched a community foundation-The Bronx Community Foundation-dedicated to improving the lives of Bronxites. While a lot of good had been happening in The Bronx, Derrick and Desmon believed that a community foundation would help to bring the systemic and institutional change to the borough; change they felt was necessary to bring economic, health, educational, etc., equality to The Bronx. Yet, nearly four years later, they had managed to raise little from donors; headwinds included those in the community who did not support the idea of a community foundation. When COVID-19 struck New York City in March 2020, the Lewises saw an opportunity to demonstrate the need for a place-based convener organization, such as a community foundation, in The Bronx. A relief effort was launched with a host of partners, which raised $10 million to help people of The Bronx who were impacted by COVID-19. Now in late July, the Lewises wanted to build on the momentum of the relief fund to finally get support and traction for the community foundation. They had much to decide: How to raise money for the foundation, which would need to come primarily from outside of the borough; who should lead the foundation; and what should be the foundation's operating model. The Lewises believed there was a window of opportunity that they needed to seize to turn their dream of a community foundation for The Bronx into a reality. The case provides an overview of community foundations in the U.S., an overview of The Bronx, The Bronx Community Relief Effort, and the Lewis brothers' early days and their efforts to start a community foundation, the opportunity, and the challenges.
The case opens in August 2020 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey's oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are navigating Migros through COVID-19 and the unprecedented surge in demand in online groceries. Between the first official case in Turkey in March and August, customers have flocked to online shopping and Migros' teams have been busy trying to solve the picking, fulfillment, and logistics bottlenecks. In the six months, the company recruited and trained new pickers, expanded its delivery fleet, and converted less busy stores into dark stores. Quick to react, Migros was able to add new customers to its base and was proud of its accomplishments. Now, unable to forecast how much of the surge in demand for online was here to stay, how should Migros plan for the future of Sanal Market and Hemen? Was there anything the company could do to sustain the number of hybrid shoppers it acquired during the past few months?
To achieve faster organic growth, firms need to change their prevailing narrative about innovation from growth denying to growth enabling. This requires changing the system through which the work of innovation gets done. This article describes the work systems model of organizational change and shows how a leadership team can select the most influential elements of the system to make a desired narrative a reality. Four elements of the work system are especially effective at encouraging a growth-affirming narrative: leadership commitment to innovation talent, prudent risk-taking, customer-centric innovation, and aligning metrics and incentives.
Influencer marketing represents a $10 billion industry in 2020 and is becoming of increasing relevance for many firms, especially those operating in a business-to-consumer environment. Few firms in the fashion, beauty, travel, food, or beverage industries are running marketing campaigns these days that do not include, at least to some share, a collaboration with popular users on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. However, many marketing managers still have a less than adequate understanding of those platforms compared with their knowledge of more traditional media channels and often find it hard to make the right decision in this fast-moving environment. To provide some guidance in this respect, this article aims to give an introduction to the most critical platforms for influencer marketing. It then presents advice to firms who want to engage in influencer marketing as well as specific questions on identifying the right influencers to collaborate with.
This case describes Visa Inc's (Visa) challenges in light of the growing influence of financial technology companies (fintech) in the payments space. In 2018, Visa had firmly established its leadership in the industry with its ubiquitous network of merchants, customers, and financial institutions in 200 countries. However, the rise of fintech over the past two decades had led to an explosion of new competitors and new methods of payment. While Visa found it easier to collaborate with the big tech (e.g. apple) and payment ecosystem (e.g. Paypal) companies in adopting new technologies and offering new payment solutions, it found it challenging to partner with emerging fintech's (e.g. TransferWise and Paytm) fast evolving business models. In less-mature markets, the emerging fintech's low go-to-market cost often bypassed the need for expensive physical payments infrastructure. And, in mature markets, new technologies leapfrogged the traditional card payment infrastructure by building direct connections with merchants and customers through alternate networks. How should Visa proceed vis-Ã -vis these start-ups that were seeking to redefine the payments industry? Should it preserve its legacy position by competing against these fintechs or should it seek collaborations with them to avail of mutually beneficial market opportunities? Or should it take the lead as a facilitator, actively invest in the start-ups, partner with them, and drive innovation in the payments industry?
In April 2020, Scott Einsenberg, the Head of Credit at the private equity firm Francisco Partners, is deciding whether to go ahead with extending a private lending agreement to Eventbrite, Inc. (NYSE: EB), a leading global event management and online ticketing technology platform that has been severely impacted by the cancellation of events in the face of the global coronavirus pandemic. These would be one of the first investments the recently raised Francisco Partners Credit Opportunity Fund ("FP Credit") would make. The case provide students with opportunities to explore private debt markets, the structure, strategy, and management of private credit funds, the evolution of credit and private credit in recent years, the structure and pricing of private credit agreements, the risk and return of private credit as an investment, and the analysis of a specific investing opportunity in this area.