These exercises complement the WDI Publishing Case "Pink Tax: Gender and other Price Discrimination Factors". Diana Kelly is the brand manager for a company that has a new cream that gives consumers brighter, shinier nails. It will be sold in major retail outlets like Target, Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens. Kelly is given various segmentation schemes produced by consultancy teams to evaluate. Students are asked to evaluate the segmentation schemes and determine how the product should be versioned and priced.
Parsana Health Centre Private Limited, one of the pioneers of the organized fitness industry in the city, of Ahmedabad, had been actively engaged in inculcating, nurturing and promoting a healthy lifestyle to the general public through fitness regimes over the last two decades. The thirteen Parsana centres in the different parts of the city were reduced to eight centres facing stiff competition from the local players and the Parsana brothers had to set their priorities right, in order to discover the best strategy for growth. They thereby had to put together an appropriate promotional and positioning strategy in view of the long term objectives.
In 2009, brothers Patrick and John Collison began working on a start-up called Stripe that made it simple for companies to send and receive money around the world. By the end of 2016, Stripe had expanded far beyond an online payment mechanism. Fueled by a belief that the Internet and developers would drive rapid economic growth across the world, Stripe created tools for social commerce and online marketplaces, as well as products to facilitate the creation and management of new businesses. Having raised nearly $450 million, Stripe was sufficiently funded to take advantage of a variety of industry tailwinds, including growth in global e-commerce, the proliferation of smartphones and mobile applications, and a rise in social media usage, among others. "Stripe: Increasing the GDP of the Internet" explores the challenges and opportunities faced by Stripe as it expanded from a small start-up to a company valued at $9 billion. Specific obstacles addressed in the case include: evaluating business opportunities, prioritizing new customers and markets, and assessing competition in a rapidly changing market. In a world with seemingly endless opportunities, the Collison brothers would have to be ruthless in prioritizing Stripe's product pipeline, geographical expansion, and partnerships, while continuing to provide value for Stripe's existing customers.
In 2011, a health care director at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) asked one of her managers to review two candidates for promotion to a front-line coordinator position. The manager was tasked with the job of choosing between two promising candidates who were quite different from each other. He had to carefully review the qualifications of the two candidates and determine which one would be better suited to the role. Use with supplement 9B16C050.
The founder of a digital media firm had to decide whether to list or to sell his company, PacificLink iMedia (PacificLink) in 2015. The founder had fielded more than 20 offers from various companies to acquire PacificLink since 2007–2008. He rejected all these past offers, because he was working to position the company to list on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. However, in 2015, the founder received an offer from Accenture that appealed to him because PacificLink was finally in a position to satisfy all listing requirements for the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. He knew that he must consider many criteria in making his critical decision to sell or list PacificLink. See also the first and second cases in the three-part series, 9B00M024 and 9B09M023.
In April 2016, the owner of Kreative Works, a small-scale furniture manufacturer in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India, decided to expand his company’s product line in response to increased market competition and a shift in consumers’ buying patterns and preferences. The intent was to extend the company’s market reach from its traditional target of educational institutes and offices to a consumer market by marketing a premium lounge chair and a family of dining chairs. The owner also wanted to expand the market geographically. Kreative Works did not have the capacity to open multiple retail outlets. Given these circumstances, should the company market its new product line in a single retail outlet or through an exclusive dealer or distributor (a centralized channel structure), or by distributing its products through multiple distributors or retailers (a decentralized channel structure)?
CircusTrix Trampoline Parks (CircusTrix) was started in San Francisco, California, in 2011 after the founder first experienced an indoor trampoline park. Less than five years later, the business had grown to more than 28 facilities worldwide, grossing US$24.5 million in 2014 alone. The company had originally expanded internationally to maintain its first-mover status in the emerging extreme recreation industry, but was now facing a problem that could derail the company’s international growth for years to come. A customer in the brand new CircusTrix park in Edinburgh, Scotland, had injured himself and blamed CircusTrix. As a result, city officials had shut down the facility, with another park scheduled to open in just over two weeks in Glasgow. The public relations issue was threatening to cost the founder not only his brand new operations in the United Kingdom, but likely also the additional upcoming locations in Germany, France, and Holland.
In 2012, a former crown attorney for Canada’s Department of Justice started Timeless Herbal Care, a company that was intended to capitalize on Jamaica’s deregulation of marijuana for medical purposes. The entrepreneur and his family relied on their ties to Jamaica and his legal expertise to create a legislative framework for Jamaica’s medical marijuana industry to meet international standards. Concurrently, Canada was readying legislation to allow qualified individuals to purchase and use medical marijuana. As one of about a dozen Health Canada-authorized licensed producers of the product, the new venture was entering uncharted space where legal and business issues would likely emerge within the next few years. The entrepreneur needed a strategy to combat the misconceptions about the use of marijuana for medical purposes and concerns regarding the importation of Jamaican marijuana product into Canada.
In 2016, a soccer fan closely followed the scores, standings, and transfers of players in the European soccer leagues. Having witnessed countless exchanges of players from one team to another, she wondered about the factors that team managers considered when determining the players’ market values. She gathered data on 77 notable soccer players in an effort to better understand the essential factors that made the players valuable. Could she use the variables she had collected to also build a functioning model that would predict a player’s market value?
The case describes the decision dilemma faced by an entrepreneur, Jack Sim, whose social initiative aims to establish an innovative platform in Singapore and South Asia to serve the base of the pyramid (BoP), which represents a majority of the population of the world (about 60%) who live in poverty. The primary objectives of Sim's initiative, BoP Hub, are to provide professional services to social entrepreneurs catering to the BoP market, and help them develop and scale their businesses. Social entrepreneurs who want to address the needs of this segment of the population face a plethora of challenges: most notably, the lack of affordability in the BoP, inadequate access to basic facilities, and the dearth of channels of access to the BoP market. However, in addition to the social objectives, the BoP also has economic incentives, as the potential volume in this segment is huge, and it has aspirations to move into the middle class. The challenges faced by Sim in creating a platform to catalyse innovative products and services for the BoP include lack of access to traditional fundraising methods, the need of a common organisational strategy for entrepreneurs serving the BoP leading to multiple services being required by them, and the requirement of a well-understood model for scaling their businesses.
In early 2016, after the success of its first two smartphones, the OnePlus One and OnePlus 2, China-based startup smartphone maker OnePlus was deciding how to build on its early success and grow into a global contender in the highly competitive smartphone market. Technology enthusiasts and geeks had flocked to purchase the first two generations of its smartphones and expectations were high for the company's next product. The company's founders, Pete Lau and Carl Pei, faced the challenge of broadening the appeal of OnePlus to address the mainstream market without alienating its core customer base. "Crossing the chasm" from the early adopters to the mainstream market involved addressing three interrelated questions: First, what segments should OnePlus target as it sought to grow beyond its loyal fan base? Second, what value proposition and positioning strategy should it adopt to appeal to these target customers? Finally, what distribution and marketing communications strategy should it employ to make best use of its limited financial resources? A key consideration in formulating its strategy was to stay true to the company's culture and mission of "Never Settle" by charting its own course and not emulating the strategies of much larger competitors like Apple, Samsung, LG, and HTC.
The Canadian brand manager of Zelboraf had to decide how to introduce and price Zelboraf in the Canadian market. Zelboraf was a breakthrough discovery in treatment for melanoma cancer patients. Hoffmann-La Roche (Roche) began developing Zelboraf in 2005. During the clinical trials, the drug yielded such positive results in targeting late-stage (metastatic) melanoma cancer that Roche ended clinical trials early in order to expedite FDA approval and market launch. A competitor was developing a drug—Dabrafenib—that targeted the same segment of patients with B-RAF genes. It was unclear if this specific market segment could support two similar products. It was also unclear whether Dabrafenib’s Canadian market launch would affect the likelihood that Zelboraf got on the approved drug list to secure government reimbursement. The brand manager and her team also needed to determine the right price point for Zelboraf. Roche had to set a price that ensured profitability, but did not compromise Zelboraf’s competitive position.
By 2016, Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell had led the 255-year-old pencil manufacturer Faber-Castell through waves of technological change. The pocket calculator decimated Faber-Castell's slide rule business in the 1970s, and computer aided design technology undermined the company's manual drafting tools in the 1980s. With each new threat the Count had to decide whether to adapt to new technologies, or maintain focus on the company's core products and identity. Analysts continued to ask Count Anton-Wolfgang the same question they had posed to his grandfather: could the company strategy endure in the modern era?
Supplement to case UV7217. The purpose of this document is to describe each step in the development of a model for the case "A Late Night at The Virginian Restaurant."