In 2016, China witnessed a significant rise in the knowledge economy. Many users, who had been used to consuming information on the Internet for free, had become increasingly willing to pay for user-generated-content (UGC). Recognizing this emerging opportunity, Qiushibaike (QB), a well-established UGC platform with a focus on entertaining content, rolled out a new pay-for-knowledge product, namely Youliaodao (YLD), which focused on informational content. Instead of following the popular pay-for-knowledge product endorsed by eye-catching celebrities for hedonic needs, YLD differentiated itself by charging for high-quality UGC for practical problem-solving. QB needed to make a critical decision: Should the company support YLD with additional investments and promotion of its informational content, or should QB terminate YLD and return to the company’s core competence area of promoting more entertaining content? How could YLD cope with the increased competition and overcome these obstacles?
In early January 2018, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Tamul Plates Marketing Private Limited had just confirmed the next round of much-needed funding. Having accomplished this goal, he was reassured that funding was taken care of until 2020. The funds would drive a long-awaited expansion and take the company to its next phase of growth. Although he had worked hard to refine the company’s business model over the previous six to seven years, the co-founder was still working on fine tuning the company’s distribution strategy. One challenge was how to expand distribution channels across India. Historically, more than 70 per cent of sales came from wholesalers. However, with increasing attention on building the brand, the co-founder worried that this approach might not work in the future.
This case deals with the planned market expansion of Metagenom Bio Inc. (MBI), a Canadian microbiome company that specializes in designing and structuring novel environmental monitoring and remediation technology and processes. The case revolves around the situation in 2019 facing Patrick Ang, the CEO of MBI, who has to take strategic decisions at a crucial point of MBI's development of a potential entry to China while keeping confidential the details of the IP of MBI.
Jacquelyn Yang is the Senior Marketing Manager at a young Singapore company, Funding Societies, in the nascent debt crowdfunding scene in the island city-state. Debt crowdfunding, also referred to as peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, represents an alternative source of loans for businesses to borrow money. P2P companies are different from banks in that they operate through online platforms, utilise data analytics and algorithms for credit risk assessment, and have much shorter turnaround times for loan approvals than the banks. Moreover, while banks lend money to companies using customer deposits, P2P companies play the part of a matchmaker by enabling individual investors to put money directly towards funding a particular loan. Crowdfunding is part of a growing worldwide trend in FinTech innovations. It is perhaps unsurprising then that there were no fewer than seven P2P lenders in a mere three years since the first company, MoolahSense, was founded in Singapore in 2013. The rivalry is intense and exacerbated by the fact that business loans tend to be a product that does not differentiate on non-price factors. In addition, all of the competing companies, with the exception of CoAssets, appear to be competing head-on for the same general SME market. To improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, it would be helpful for Funding Societies to move away from a 'shotgun' approach to marketing to more carefully identify the segments or types of SMEs that would be more inclined to borrow from the crowdfunding market. These SMEs would represent the 'lower hanging fruit' so-to-speak, and identifying who they are will help Funding Societies better focus their marketing resources. Understanding the factors that influence an SME's decision to borrow from a P2P lender will help Funding Societies build a strong competitive advantage, giving it an edge over its P2P competitors as well as banks. What should Yang focus the marketing strategy on?
In-N-Out was an iconic burger chain that had changed little since it was founded in 1948. The company remained family-owned and had continually resisted going public. The company was only located in seven US states and grew slowly and deliberately in order to ensure that it could continue to offer a high quality product and experience to its customers at low prices. Current CEO Lynsi Snyder was interested in continued growth for In-N-Out, but not at the cost of sacrificing the quality of its products or the unique way in which the company operated. How could she grow the company without altering its identity?
In June 2018, Lena Koke, the co-founder of Axess Law Professional Corporation, a legal services enterprise in Toronto, Ontario, was examining how to take the firm to the next level of growth. Koke had to determine what legal products and services the firm could expand and diversify into, how the firm should leverage information technology to reinforce its low-cost positioning, and how the firm should finance growth. The co-founder must evaluate the road map that she chose, and develop a long-term strategic plan for the firm.
On October 15, 2019, the Doc32 office was celebrating its achievement of month-end revenue goals. Doc32 was an online management and marketing platform for dental health care based in Pune, Maharashtra, India. The company was dedicated to helping its partner dentists find clients and reduce operational costs. The Doc32 platform provided optimized solutions, innovative marketing techniques, and dentistry supplies at a discounted rate. The Doc32 founders were pleased with the online platform’s success to date and saw it as validation of their chosen business model. However, they were wondering how to replicate that success across the entire country. What growth strategies could the new venture adopt to achieve its goals for growth, diversification, product development, market penetration, and market development?
When a company is looking to expand, it is natural for the managers involved—including the CEO—to have location preferences. Ivey Professors Andreas Schotter and Paul Beamish investigated how location hassles influence foreign investment decisions and sales. They found that these hassles significantly affected individuals or small groups of employees tasked with assessing potential opportunities. Firms must overcome managerial biases and identify champions willing to tackle location hassles in difficult markets that have the potential to generate a high return on investment—especially if the hassle factors of those markets are keeping the competition away. Many characteristics that are perceived hassles for managers of firms from traditional industrialized locations like Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan are not seen as such by managers from rapidly internationalizing emerging-market firms. The authors recommend three actions to take to utilize and build on the hassle factor: 1) raise awareness of managerial biases and on-the-ground location factors, 2) raise global strategic capacity, and 3) leverage a more diverse talent pool. Firms should hire for a global mindset and not just for technical job competencies or single-location knowledge. They should also recognize that some otherwise high-performing managers may be ill-suited for roles involving high-hassle locations.
On June 30, 2018, the founders of Mkhiwa Trust, Johannesburg, South Africa, considered their dilemma of deepening their impact in South Africa, using education as a key vehicle to bring about systemic change. The case highlights the evolution of their mutual support throughout their careers. The tragic death of their young son had far-reaching implications for the couple and their business interests, their career aspirations and the focus of many of their future business and philanthropic initiatives. It also defined a number of choices taken by the couple since then. The story of these individual leaders, who support each other in their businesses, illustrates the power of a couple as servant leaders.
Founded in 2010, CredEx has been a fast and constant innovator in the microfinance industry in China. Tang Xia, CEO and co-founder of CredEx, has led the company through a number of profound business model innovations in response to external environment changes, which transformed the company from an offline, operation heavy micro lending company to an online, data driven FinTech company. This case describes CredEx's business model transformation process since its founding and explores the drivers and challenges in different stages of business model innovation and transformation. Ultimately, the case highlights the key capabilities needed to digitize a traditional finance business as well as the organizational changes needed to enable the digitization.
In June 2018, Lena Koke, the co-founder of Axess Law Professional Corporation, a legal services enterprise in Toronto, Ontario, was examining how to take the firm to the next level of growth. Koke had to determine what legal products and services the firm could expand and diversify into, how the firm should leverage information technology to reinforce its low-cost positioning, and how the firm should finance growth. The co-founder must evaluate the road map that she chose, and develop a long-term strategic plan for the firm.
On June 30, 2018, the founders of Mkhiwa Trust, Johannesburg, South Africa, considered their dilemma of deepening their impact in South Africa, using education as a key vehicle to bring about systemic change. The case highlights the evolution of their mutual support throughout their careers. The tragic death of their young son had far-reaching implications for the couple and their business interests, their career aspirations and the focus of many of their future business and philanthropic initiatives. It also defined a number of choices taken by the couple since then. The story of these individual leaders, who support each other in their businesses, illustrates the power of a couple as servant leaders.
In-N-Out was an iconic burger chain that had changed little since it was founded in 1948. The company remained family-owned and had continually resisted going public. The company was only located in seven US states and grew slowly and deliberately in order to ensure that it could continue to offer a high quality product and experience to its customers at low prices. Current CEO Lynsi Snyder was interested in continued growth for In-N-Out, but not at the cost of sacrificing the quality of its products or the unique way in which the company operated. How could she grow the company without altering its identity?
On October 15, 2019, the Doc32 office was celebrating its achievement of month-end revenue goals. Doc32 was an online management and marketing platform for dental health care based in Pune, Maharashtra, India. The company was dedicated to helping its partner dentists find clients and reduce operational costs. The Doc32 platform provided optimized solutions, innovative marketing techniques, and dentistry supplies at a discounted rate. The Doc32 founders were pleased with the online platform's success to date and saw it as validation of their chosen business model. However, they were wondering how to replicate that success across the entire country. What growth strategies could the new venture adopt to achieve its goals for growth, diversification, product development, market penetration, and market development?
In June 2019, a newly promoted branch manager of a bank in Davao City, Philippines, must recommend to the bank's head office who among six loan applicants will obtain loans from the branch. She has received applications for 24 million in loans but can only grant 18 million. The branch manager needs to (a) decide how much to loan and to which customers, (b) find ways to retain valuable customers and acquire new ones, and (c) consider new avenues to accommodate the increasing number of applicants at her branch. The case encourages students to apply customer relationship management concepts in deciding which borrowers to recommend and it offers an opportunity to discuss the role of marketers as trusted advisers to their clients.
Guelph-based Intrigue Media (Intrigue), a marketing agency, has built a wholly-owned and operated network of 200 television screens in high-traffic consumer environments in Southwestern Ontario. The network reaches 1.5 million potential customers per month, and targets local small businesses wanting to expand their customer base. The business development manager at Intrigue has been tasked with developing a business plan to grow this video advertising network. She is reviewing several options, one of which includes the opportunity to seek outside investment.
In late 2018, a social entrepreneur in Iceland realized he needed to make changes to his enterprise working with socially-isolated children and youth. His operating model was to host bicycle rides with children and youth, and to encourage them to engage fully as young people. Most of these children had not previously engaged in physical activity, and many experienced not only social difficulties, but also physical challenges as a result of being overweight or obese. The social entrepreneur was spending much of his time negotiating sponsorship and service agreements and as a result, he spent less time engaging with the focus of his initiative-at-risk children and youth. He was also funding some of the initiative himself, putting his personal financial circumstances at risk. How could this social entrepreneur develop a robust, sustainable business model that would enable him to develop financial independence, support the youths' involvement in an annual cycling ride that circumnavigated Iceland, and enable the business to expand so that it no longer relied totally on one person?
Guelph-based Intrigue Media (Intrigue), a marketing agency, has built a wholly-owned and operated network of 200 television screens in high-traffic consumer environments in Southwestern Ontario. The network reaches 1.5 million potential customers per month, and targets local small businesses wanting to expand their customer base. The business development manager at Intrigue has been tasked with developing a business plan to grow this video advertising network. She is reviewing several options, one of which includes the opportunity to seek outside investment.
In June 2019, a newly promoted branch manager of a bank in Davao City, Philippines, must recommend to the bank’s head office who among six loan applicants will obtain loans from the branch. She has received applications for ₱24 million in loans but can only grant ₱18 million. The branch manager needs to (a) decide how much to loan and to which customers, (b) find ways to retain valuable customers and acquire new ones, and (c) consider new avenues to accommodate the increasing number of applicants at her branch. The case encourages students to apply customer relationship management concepts in deciding which borrowers to recommend and it offers an opportunity to discuss the role of marketers as trusted advisers to their clients.
As consumers watch the global coronavirus pandemic play out in print, across digital media, and on TV, it is clear that not all brand managers are performing equally well—at least not after collectively flooding e-mail inboxes with “We are here for you” messages. The moves made by brand managers in corporate communications have been all over the map. The good moves have been made by those who understand why actions speak louder than words. However, while being creative can pay brand dividends, it also creates risk. The last thing you want is to look like you’re exploiting a crisis. There have been many brand announcements about redirecting media dollars to public services, but timing matters. As with any brand initiative, consumers tend to reward the first mover and ignore the copycats—unless they’re brilliant. A brand, of course, isn’t just influenced by how it supports the community. How a company treats employees also has a significant impact. When disaster strikes, if there is something helpful you can do, then just do it and do it quickly. If there is something helpful you can say, then say it, and feel free to say it creatively if you can do so with compassion. And if you don’t have anything to offer or your message doesn’t come naturally, then don’t waste everybody’s time trying to attract attention.