In recent years, new consumer brands have mushroomed to meet consumers' increasingly diverse and personalized demands. However, some struggled to achieve sustainable, long-term growth as they relied heavily on capital investment, outsourced production, and excessive marketing. This case focuses on Winona, a functional skincare brand for sensitive skin, and its parent company, Botanee. It unveils how Winona achieved product innovation through consistent R&D efforts, built a presence in the niche market of sensitive skin by leveraging multi-touchpoint marketing across various channels, and evolved into a leading skincare brand in the Chinese market. As a result, Winona featured in Tmall's sales top 10 in the cosmetics and skincare category for several consecutive years since 2018, becoming the only Chinese brand maintaining this position. However, Botanee faced several challenges as it sought to grow its business further. With Winona contributing 99% of the company's revenue, how could Botanee expand its brand portfolio and broaden its consumer base? While Winona's flagship product, Anti-Sensitive Moisturizing Tolerance-Extreme Cream, remained its primary revenue driver, how could the brand establish a second "hero product" to sustain its growth in the future? The issue of internal branding also came to the fore as Botanee's business expanded, touchpoints multiplied, and organizational structure grew increasingly complex.
Little more than a year had passed since Chrissy Taylor, granddaughter of the company's founder and daughter of its longest-serving CEO, had been promoted, in December 2019, to CEO of Enterprise Holdings, the parent company of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Taylor had spent her entire career in the family-owned business, but like all Enterprise employees, she started as a management trainee at a branch office. "Just like everybody else in our upper management, I started behind a rental counter," Taylor said in an interview at the time of her promotion. "I worked my way up in various roles, learning the job by doing it: washing cars, picking up customers." She was determined to continue the legacy of her family's company, which her father famously described as being committed to three things: "listening to and satisfying our customers, creating opportunities for our employees, and achieving long-term, sustainable growth."
In December 2021, the director of Options Pregnancy Centre (Options) was challenged with determining how to expand the services offered by the organization in its Montreal, Quebec, community, as the need to support women who planned to carry their pregnancies and pursue parenting was becoming more acute. Options already offered counselling, grief and loss support, and a variety of parenting programs; it also facilitated required medical services and provided opportunities for pregnant teens to live with host families on either short- or long-term bases. The organization occasionally had opportunities to develop its own residential program. Doing so would mean shifting its strategy from providing services on a non-residential basis to having its own residential program. Should Options expand its current non-residential programs? Should it more actively recruit families who were willing to take pregnant teenagers into their homes for short periods of time? Should it take the bold step of making an offer on a residential building that was currently available? The director recognized that it would be necessary to carefully prioritize Options’ programming to ensure that it could secure the resources it needed to run effective programs.
The partners at ZGM Modern Marketing were pleased with their growth and progress of working within the highly competitive marketing industry and had confidence in their team of skilled employees supporting the company’s success. But they also knew a good thing never lasts forever and had to continually strategize to stay ahead of the competition. While the partners were used to being very hands-on with the day-to-day management of people, ZGM had grown to a point where it was becoming difficult to juggle all aspects of the business without adding specialized resources. Bringing on non-billable people such as the new HR Director puts a strain on the profitability of a company. The challenge was how to maximize the value of these new resources.
Brice Scheschuk, chief executive officer of WIND Mobile, embarks on a transformative journey to revitalize the company's organizational culture. This case provides a lens into the challenges and opportunities inherent in building a workplace culture in a fast-paced telecommunications market. Scheschuk employs a strategy that places significant focus on the field employees, who are often overlooked in corporate strategies. Students will gain insights into the nuanced art of leading change, leveraging HR as a strategic asset, and measuring the effectiveness of cultural interventions. This case employees qualitative and quantitative data and is an exemplar for those aiming to integrate HR strategy with organizational effectiveness.
Founded in 2006, Shanghai Action Education Technology Co., Ltd. (Action Education), a provider of management training services for small and medium-sized private enterprises, was the first listed management education company in China. In 2014, due to the fierceness of the market competition and the splitting of the top management team, Action Education changed their strategy from a product-oriented one to customer-oriented one and repositioned themselves as a “world-class practical business school.” This strategic change not only helped Action Education win the recognition and loyalty of their customers but enhanced the company’s profitability and management ability. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and rising consumer demand, Action Education faced increasing pressure. Li Jian, the chair of Action Education, is considering two paths with different customer value focuses: should he add a consulting business unit and provide one-stop services for customers or standardize the company’s management training services and improve their quality and delivery?
In July 2021, a major supply-side crisis in Nigeria forced the Dangote Tomato Processing Co. Limited plant of Dangote Farming to operate at just 20 per cent of its production capacity. Since its inception in 2016, the plant was shut down several times due to a shortage of fresh tomatoes of the required quality. Although the Nigerian government supported Dangote Farming by pursuing pro-tomato and pro-tomato-paste policies, it was unable to operate its processing plant at full capacity, reduce per-unit cost, and improve profitability. Due to various constraints, several tomato processing plants had exited the Nigerian market in the past several years. In view of persistent supply-side problems and tough competition from low-priced Chinese tomato paste, Dangote Farming needed to decide about the continuity of its tomato processing plant in the Nigerian market. If it decided to remain in the market, then it needed to devise strategies that could make the plant competitive and profitable.
ASML Holding NV (ASML) was a leading technology company headquartered in the Netherlands that specialized in the design and production of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment. It had a global presence, with operations in Asia, Europe, and North America. Its unique chip manufacturing technology was essential for the development of technology products from military equipment and laundry machines to the smartphones in peoples' pockets. ASML produced complex and consequential products that were the foundations of the modern economy. Because of this, ASML played a significant role in global geopolitics and found itself in the middle of the West's increasing efforts to control exports of semiconductor technology to China. In December 2022, a couple of months after the US government unilaterally restricted exports of chip technology to China, ASML faced a strategic crossroads: should it maximize company profits and ignore Western policy by engaging China, or should it weigh the pitfalls of ignoring the West's political decision to block China from essential technology and disengage from its business with the People's Republic of China?
Why dealing with turnover requires understanding how the traditional foundation of the workplace has been cracked by a seismic shift in the employer-employee relationship.
Founded in 2006, Shanghai Action Education Technology Co., Ltd. (Action Education), a provider of management training services for small and medium-sized private enterprises, was the first listed management education company in China. In 2014, due to the fierceness of the market competition and the splitting of the top management team, Action Education changed their strategy from a product-oriented one to customer-oriented one and repositioned themselves as a "world-class practical business school." This strategic change not only helped Action Education win the recognition and loyalty of their customers but enhanced the company's profitability and management ability. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and rising consumer demand, Action Education faced increasing pressure. Li Jian, the chair of Action Education, is considering two paths with different customer value focuses: should he add a consulting business unit and provide one-stop services for customers or standardize the company's management training services and improve their quality and delivery?
In December 2021, the director of Options Pregnancy Centre (Options) was challenged with determining how to expand the services offered by the organization in its Montreal, Quebec, community, as the need to support women who planned to carry their pregnancies and pursue parenting was becoming more acute. Options already offered counselling, grief and loss support, and a variety of parenting programs; it also facilitated required medical services and provided opportunities for pregnant teens to live with host families on either short- or long-term bases. The organization occasionally had opportunities to develop its own residential program. Doing so would mean shifting its strategy from providing services on a non-residential basis to having its own residential program. Should Options expand its current non-residential programs? Should it more actively recruit families who were willing to take pregnant teenagers into their homes for short periods of time? Should it take the bold step of making an offer on a residential building that was currently available? The director recognized that it would be necessary to carefully prioritize Options' programming to ensure that it could secure the resources it needed to run effective programs.
The partners at ZGM Modern Marketing were pleased with their growth and progress of working within the highly competitive marketing industry and had confidence in their team of skilled employees supporting the company's success. But they also knew a good thing never lasts forever and had to continually strategize to stay ahead of the competition. While the partners were used to being very hands-on with the day-to-day management of people, ZGM had grown to a point where it was becoming difficult to juggle all aspects of the business without adding specialized resources. Bringing on non-billable people such as the new HR Director puts a strain on the profitability of a company. The challenge was how to maximize the value of these new resources.
Brice Scheschuk, chief executive officer of WIND Mobile, embarks on a transformative journey to revitalize the company's organizational culture. This case provides a lens into the challenges and opportunities inherent in building a workplace culture in a fast-paced telecommunications market. Scheschuk employs a strategy that places significant focus on the field employees, who are often overlooked in corporate strategies. Students will gain insights into the nuanced art of leading change, leveraging HR as a strategic asset, and measuring the effectiveness of cultural interventions. This case employees qualitative and quantitative data and is an exemplar for those aiming to integrate HR strategy with organizational effectiveness.
Kyrö Distillery Company (Kyrö), founded in 2012 in Isokyrö, Finland, focused on producing rye whisky from Finnish rye. However, it took an average of three years for one batch of whisky to be produced and ready for sale, so, to cover their costs and stay afloat, the founders decided to start producing gin, which could be produced faster. As luck had it, in 2014, Kyrö’s rye-based Napue Gin was named the best gin in the gin-and-tonic category in the UK-based International Wine & Spirit Competition, and Kyrö now had two promising products in its roster: rye whisky and rye-based gin. <br><br>Kyrö exported its products to overseas markets, including Japan, where its results had so far been modest, but it planned to expand and grow its businesses in Japan. As an underdog in an industry dominated by major global players, Kyrö had to work to increase its market share. It relied on its authentic brand image, original products, and brand ambassadors. In September 2022, as one of Kyrö’s co-founders travelled to Japan to meet with the company’s main Japanese distributor, he wondered, How could the company gain growth in a market that was highly competitive and dominated by well-established local companies?
The Web 2.0 digital economy, centered on dominant platforms, generates substantial opportunities for managers and entrepreneurs yet creates critical dependencies. Platform-dependent businesses engage in competitive actions-rivalrous, competitive-cooperative, and relational-vis-Ã -vis digital platforms to gain a fair share of economic value. While the (supposedly) trustworthy custodians of digital data have captured a disproportionate share of revenue and profits, Web3 promises to tilt the balance away from dominant platforms by providing mechanisms that replace centralized organizational trust with decentralized technological trust. Here, innovations such as blockchains and smart contracts complement antitrust laws and regulations in limiting platform power. Furthermore, this study suggests that end users, peers, and regulators may play an important role in helping businesses draw investors', users', and customers' attention away from Web 2.0 platforms. To effectively leverage decentralized trust as a novel aspect of competitive actions, business leaders must pursue Web3 technologies that are reliable, high-growth market segments that are credible, and ventures that are investable.
Recordings of virtual meetings have become a common part of virtual and hybrid workplace environments. Meeting recordings offer potential benefits (e.g., speedy transcript production, expedited information sharing, searchable information, inclusion of visual and tonal expressions) and drawbacks (e.g., difficulty discussing sensitive issues, employee privacy, limited off-the-record capabilities, and employee concerns over sharing recordings). Given this variance, policies for virtual meetings are a necessity. Managers can successfully implement a policy by cocreating policy preferences with employees in open-ended and nonjudgmental conversations that openly discuss potential benefits, drawbacks, and employee concerns. Topics such as when to record, when not to record, how to gain consent, and who will have administrative and sharing rights should be covered. Areas of less urgency that may yet be part of these discussions include accessibility concerns, the use or rejection of software features, where and for how long meeting recordings should be stored, and such emerging issues as the use of virtual reality and AI tools. Managers should deliver policy preferences to a group of representatives from Human Resources, Information Technology, and the executive team to compose the policy, request a legal review, and to introduce and implement it in the organization.
When low-income and disadvantaged individuals start businesses-herein, poverty entrepreneurs-the experience of fear can be especially impactful on their behavior. In this article, we explore the role of fear as an obstacle and facilitator in both the launching and development of ventures by poverty entrepreneurs. Two primary fears are examined. The first, fear of failure, has been examined extensively by scholars yet has received scant attention concerning poverty entrepreneurs. Our second focus is the fear of success, which has received even less emphasis and is not well-understood in the context of business. It is a seemingly paradoxical notion that individuals can perceive negative consequences from what is otherwise a successful outcome. Using experiences from the Urban Poverty and Business Initiative-an 11-month annual intervention program that operates in 32 cities across the globe and serves over 2,000 disadvantaged entrepreneurs-we developed a series of focus groups with poverty entrepreneurs to learn more about their encounters with fear. A reconceptualization of these fears in a poverty context is provided. The potential upsides and downsides of fear when it comes to entrepreneurial behavior are examined, and implications are drawn from the coexistence of fears of failure and success.
The rise of employee mobility over the past few decades has significant implications for both organizational performance and individual careers. The traditional organizational response aims to combat turnover with increased retention efforts, but we offer an alternative strategy. In this article, we suggest that organizations also support employee mobility by proactively implementing practices that prepare workers for the next step in their career, whether that be internal or external from the company. When strategically combined, these practices can support a climate for career mobility. Drawing on extant management literature and industry publications, we demonstrate how organizations can create and support a climate for career mobility via workforce planning, job design, recruiting, onboarding, offboarding, and total rewards. Taken together, a strategic bundle of practices allows employers to support the careers of mobile workers as well as advance the goals and performance of the organization.
Fake reviews have become a pervasive problem in the realm of online commerce, affecting businesses and consumers alike. These fraudulent reviews can cause significant damage to the credibility of companies and negatively impact consumer welfare. While various platforms, such as Yelp and Amazon, have implemented measures to combat fake reviews, these efforts have been largely ineffective and, at times, even exacerbated the problem. As a result, on November 8, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it is soliciting input for possible regulations around ways to fight fake reviews. The growing sophistication of Artificial Intelligence-particularly generative AI technologies like ChatGPT-worsens the problem by enabling the production of human-like fake reviews at an unprecedented scale. This lends new urgency to the fake review problem, so it is imperative to examine the pros and cons of extant approaches and propose alternative approaches that are better equipped to tackle the issue. In this article, we introduce a novel approach using digital identity verification, which involves verifying a user's identity via various forms of digital information that represent the individual and have not been applied to online reviews. We highlight the limitations of extant techniques and outline ways in which digital identity verification may be a promising solution to the problem of fake reviews. Potential benefits and challenges, as well as the effectiveness of our proposed approach in addressing the issue of fake reviews, are discussed.
This article explores how large companies in Ukraine have been responding to the crisis caused by the war. We find that the core theories of managerial reaction to crisis-the threat-rigidity and contingency theories-aptly describe companies' responses to the war, with the first theory explaining companies' initial reactions, and the latter theory explaining the subsequent behaviors of companies as the war continued. The most surprising findings here were the value of the pandemic as an experience in dealing with war, and the way in which, when war becomes the new normal, managers seek to take advantage of opportunities to build resilience and redundancy. The shift in perception and attitude this entails exemplifies the adaptability companies display in the face of such difficult situations as a full-fledged war. Our research yields four suggestions for managerial responses to crises: (1) view every crisis as a learning opportunity in preparation for future crises, (2) use business continuity plans as a means of reducing initial threat-rigidity reactions, (3) prioritize crucial over nonrelevant corrective actions, and (4) recognize that crisis-generated discontinuities may last longer than expected, thereby requiring long-term plans that respond both to emerging threats and to novel opportunities.