In 2015, the general manager of Maritimes Credit Union based in Atlantic Canada was faced with a merger proposal that involved amalgamation with another, much larger credit union. The major concern was how co-operatives and credit unions could compete while retaining the values and mission that were at the core of their foundation. The credit union was dealing with the issue of competing in a modern world where technology was changing at a rapid pace, where the value demanded by younger customers had evolved, and where the competitive landscape was more intense, even in rural areas. The values and culture of a credit union were called into question as it coped by developing strategies that resembled those of investor-owned firms.

Teracom Limited was a medium-sized engineering manufacturing firm in India whose product portfolio included modems. The company catered to the various telecom service providers across India, including Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited , a major state-owned telecommunications company. Teracom's customers were primarily business-to-business entities such as government organizations and telecom operators. However, it was considering selling its modems to retail customers. After seeking applications for new distributors of Teracom modems, the company narrowed the list down to four candidate firms. In December 2014, Teracom's president of corporate business had to use a distributor selection model and undertake a distributor performance appraisal. What were the main criteria for evaluating the four applicants, and which firm was the best fit?

In 2015, jane's short & sweet, a United States-based for-profit business, regularly dedicated 25 per cent of its revenue to charities supporting its mission of improving the education and healthcare of marginalized women. The company also engaged in some environmental practices with respect to its use of resources. jane's short & sweet's owner understood that she would have to make some trade-offs between people and profit while still attempting to remain consistent with her company's social purpose and contribute to the resolution of its current problem-finding a way to fill a customer order that exceeded the company's production capacity. While addressing the company's new labour needs, the owner needed to evaluate how the trade-off between mission and money would affect the company's labour source, hourly wages, pricing strategy, product price, and organizational goals. To do so, the owner had to identify and evaluate the options that would enable her to better fulfill her company's role as a social sustainable enterprise.

In 2015, jane’s short & sweet, a United States-based for-profit business, regularly dedicated 25 per cent of its revenue to charities supporting its mission of improving the education and healthcare of marginalized women. The company also engaged in some environmental practices with respect to its use of resources. jane's short & sweet’s owner understood that she would have to make some trade-offs between people and profit while still attempting to remain consistent with her company’s social purpose and contribute to the resolution of its current problem—finding a way to fill a customer order that exceeded the company's production capacity. While addressing the company’s new labour needs, the owner needed to evaluate how the trade-off between mission and money would affect the company's labour source, hourly wages, pricing strategy, product price, and organizational goals. To do so, the owner had to identify and evaluate the options that would enable her to better fulfil her company’s role as a social sustainable enterprise.

At the end of September 2015, Matthias Mueller stepped in as CEO for the Volkswagen Group, days after Martin Winterkorn resigned over the biggest automotive emissions scandal the world had ever seen. Weeks before, the United States Environmental Protection Agency confirmed the result of investigations proving that Volkswagen had installed software in its most successful diesel engines, which were cheating on the test stand and manipulating results. The successful rapid expansion of Volkswagen's TDI models in the US market was based on fraud. Across brands, about 11 million of the Group's diesel vehicles worldwide were later discovered to have had the cheating device installed. This shattered the worldwide brand and developed into a threat to the formerly pristine image of "Made in Germany" products. Mueller, a veteran of the Volkswagen group, took charge in maneuvering Volkswagen Group out of the crisis, finding technical solutions and regaining the trust of customers, authorities and employees. The Group claimed that the scandal was the result of a chain of errors dating back to 2005. The case illustrates how a failure of proper corporate governance, over-ambitious target-setting and an authoritarian management culture can lead a successful company into crisis. It also leaves us to ponder why a corporate leader in social responsibility could be linked to such a massive scandal.

It was October 2015, Charlie Wong, CEO of Zuji Hong Kong told the media at the launch of Zuji's new brand campaign "Search, Discover and Share" that he would like to see Zuji "become the Google for travel" in Hong Kong. Indeed, a deemed pioneer and leading online travel agent ("OTA") in Hong Kong, the aspiration did not seem far-fetched. Yet, the ambition was not without challenge. Since Zuji went online in 2002, the brand had been twice sold and its geographic coverage shrunk from six to three markets: Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. Online travel booking had been slow picking up in Hong Kong. After more than 10 years, online sales remained at under 10% of the total market in Hong Kong, compared to the regional average of 25% in Asia Pacific. As momentum built up, Wong predicted the online travel agent ("OTA") market to quadruple, from 10% in 2014 to 40% in 2016. Meantime, competition from multiple fronts was flooding the market. Global leader Expedia had launched Expedia.com.hk in 2013, and was investing heavily in marketing to capture share. Traditional offline agents were busy expanding their online presence, building a hybrid model as competitive advantage. At the consumer end, mobile phones have become an indispensable travel companion and its implication went beyond the migration from one platform to another. Around the world, the industry was seeing the rise of the millennia travellers with new needs and expectations while on the road, and they were changing the rules of the game. Zuji is facing the biggest opportunity of its time to ride this wave of change and reinforced its market leadership.

In management literature, a psychological contract generally refers to an employee's beliefs about the reciprocal obligations that exist between him or her and an organization. Legal contracts, on the other hand, are agreements that create obligations between the parties that are enforceable by law. Psychological contracts are different from legal contracts in that they are characterized by the belief that both parties have entered into a set of mutual obligations. While marketing scholars and practitioners have largely overlooked the notion of psychological contracts, this article argues that a firm's customers might view the promises they believe a firm has made to them as psychological contracts. Psychological contracts are as relevant to marketing as they are to management. This article expands the notion of psychological contracts to marketing relationships and outlines internal and external strategies firms can employ to manage psychological contracts more effectively.

Social merchants are small business owners and entrepreneurs who adopt social shopping as a new sales channel. They employ social shopping intermediaries, such as Groupon and LivingSocial, to promote their products or services to price-sensitive customers at large discounts. The success of social merchants depends in part on the reputation they gain at merchant review sites (e.g., Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie's List), via which consumers post online product and merchant reviews. An analysis of social shopping provides insight regarding how social shopping works and what merchants must be aware of if they utilize social shopping intermediaries. This article shares these insights in the context of a set of health and wellness merchants that were studied for five years. Specifically, this article discusses how their Groupon daily deals affect merchant reviews, and how surviving vs. failed social merchants differ in terms of their review scores and number of reviews. Finally, this article provides recommendations about merchant review management to health and wellness merchants.

Organizations are continually challenged to increase efficiency and improve performance despite frequent cuts to personnel and budgets. These challenges force organizations to identify, develop, and diffuse various management innovations. Diffusion efforts are often met by resistance, reluctance, or ambivalence, resulting in what many consider to be a fool's errand. While management innovation may not be the forte of large, bureaucratic organizations, we present a case of study of a U.S. Air Force maintenance, repair, and overhaul organization that has recently, and successfully, diffused a large-scale management innovation. Results from the case study support the development of a diffusion of innovation framework that identifies important mechanisms associated with the acceptance, routinization, and assimilation of management innovation. The framework informs leaders of the diffusion process, while the recommended actions of relentless leadership, deliberate development of personnel, and enterprise involvement drive diffusion efforts and help leaders achieve desired results in innovation diffusion and associated performance improvement. Overall, we assert that the pursuit of management innovation is not necessarily beyond the art of the possible for business leaders.

Crowdsourcing is becoming recognized as a powerful tool that organizations can use in order to get work done, this by freelancers and non-employees. We conceptualize crowdsourcing as a subcategory of outsourcing, with compensated crowdsourcing representing situations in which individuals performing the work receive some sort of payment for accomplishing the organization's tasks. Herein, we discuss how sites that create a crowd, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, can be powerful tools for business purposes. We highlight the general features of crowdsourcing sites, offering examples drawn from current crowdsourcing sites. We then examine the wide range of tasks that can be accomplished through crowdsourcing sites. Large online worker community websites and forums have been created around such crowdsourcing sites, and we describe the functions they generally play for crowdsourced workers. We also describe how these functions offer opportunities and challenges for organizations. We close by discussing major considerations organizations need to take into account when trying to harness the power of the crowd through compensated crowdsourcing sites.

Client entertainment is a popular business practice that Chinese managers often use to facilitate business relationships and promote sales. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in China, however, have been frequently involved in corruption allegations caused by client entertainment. This article explains client entertainment's purpose, prevalence, and persistence in China and identifies the pitfalls that foreign firms often encounter when they practice client entertainment in that country. Based on field observations and first-hand experience as well as research on public and survey data, this article also provides eight prescriptive guidelines that can potentially help firms manage client entertainment more efficiently and effectively without causing ethical and legal problems.

Marketers are currently facing a 'crisis of immediacy' challenge: how to meet consumers' need to receive content, expertise, and personalized solutions in real time during their shopping experience. Today's digital technologies-such as video conferencing, location-based mobile apps, and augmented reality-provide a highly personalized and immersive environment that allows for interactivity and rich information exchange between the brand and consumer. We conducted in-depth interviews with over 35 retailers, large-scale surveys with international shoppers, and pilot projects with stores and banking institutions to study how companies are leveraging digital technologies to transform the customer experience. Our findings show that there are two main technology-based models that organizations are deploying to support customers' immediate needs: the remote expert and the digital assistant. We provide company examples of both models, as well as when they are most appropriate and success factors to inform managers.

While sustainability is an ethical issue, it is also becoming relevant from a marketing standpoint and can be particularly decisive in stakeholder relationships. Companies can approach this issue in different ways, choosing whether to publicize their good conduct or to project a responsible attitude that does not reflect what they effectively achieve. In this context, the authors propose a self-assessment matrix that identifies a better way to make sustainability a source of competitive advantage through a transparency-based approach. By way of a geological metaphor, four types of companies are presented that are distinctive based on two variables: sustainable commitment and communication. Costs and benefits are analyzed for each quadrant, as well as problems resulting from a lack of transparency. In the final section of the article, the authors discuss whether the choice to communicate sustainability can be considered ethical or whether it is only a question of business. Reflections are reported.

Mobile marketing is an ever increasingly important component of a firm's overall promotional strategy. The importance of this medium can be seen through time spent on mobile media, number of searches, and direct and indirect mobile-generated sales. Despite its increased importance, the effectiveness of mobile marketing needs to be improved based on such metrics as bounce rates, add-to-cart rates, shopping cart abandonment, and average order size. Strategies to increase the effectiveness of mobile marketing are discussed. Firms need to capitalize on the three major strategic advantages of mobile marketing: (1) the fact that mobile marketing devices are always on, always connected, and always with the consumer; (2) the ability to generate location-sensitive offers; and (3) the ability to send relevant personalized messages and offers. Firms also need to develop and implement an effective mobile marketing strategy through a series of activities. These include understanding and reacting to the complexity of mobile marketing, designing sites based on ease of use versus 'bells and whistles,' increasing opt-in rates, using effective customer engagement strategies, and developing effective mobile coupons. Criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of mobile marketing are discussed.

Distance learning-that is, providing education to students who are separated by distance and in which the pedagogical material is planned and prepared by educational institutions-is a topic of regular interest in the popular and business press. In particular, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which are open-access online courses that allow for unlimited participation, as well as SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses), are said to have revolutionized universities and the corporate education landscape. In this article we provide a nuanced analysis of the phenomenon of online distance learning. We first provide an overview of its historical evolution, and subsequently define and classify key concepts. We further discuss in detail the optimal target group in terms of participating students and teaching professors and propose corresponding frameworks for driving intrinsic student motivation and for choosing a successful online teacher. We also outline the benefits that institutions can achieve by offering online distance learning. Finally, we speak about the specific connection between online distance learning and social media by focusing on the difference between MOOCs based on traditional lecture formats (xMOOCs) and connectivist cMOOCs.

In 2008, the Multinational Natural Gas Pipeline Project was sponsored by China National Group Corporation to undertake a major international infrastructure project in Asia. The Pipeline Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of China National Group Corporation, established joint ventures with the host countries and took the lead in financing the project, which was required to be completed by the end of 2009. Initial investments and procurements were made, and payment would soon be due. However, there was a large gap between the estimated total investment and the funds available. Numerous banks expressed interest in the pipeline project, but most required the sponsor to provide a guarantee for the project’s loan. Some banks also asked for an increase in the capital ratio from less than 1 per cent to 20 per cent. The treasurer responsible for the financing of the project was now tasked with the issue of arranging the most effective way to finance the project.

Writing a business case as a class project is an effective way to help students integrate theory and practice, build a tolerance for ambiguity, develop critical thinking skills, and improve their writing ability. However, implementing a case writing project in the classroom can be both difficult and time-consuming. The Case Project Guide is designed to make this process easier. This field-tested guide walks students (alone or in groups) through the entire case writing process, including how to structure a case, collect data, define key problems and concepts, write a teaching note, and get a case published. Detailed specifications are included for structured assignments so instructors (even those with no case writing experience themselves) can quickly and easily integrate a case writing project into any traditional or online class (or independent study initiative).

In less than 20 years, Uniqlo has become the leading fast-fashion retailer in Japan and a strong player in other Asian countries like China, Korea and Taiwan. Since 1998, the company has expanded sales at double-digit rates, thanks to an aggressive pricing policy combined with a high level of quality, a mix that proved hard to resist for Asian customers. Key to Uniqlo's strategy and success was an agile supply chain inspired by the "fast-fashion" model pioneered by Inditex and also utilized by H&M, the two largest fashion retailers in the world. While Uniqlo demanded competitive prices from its suppliers, it also offered them continual technical assistance in developing and perfecting their manufacturing techniques, and supported them with a high flow of orders. Nineteen ninety-eight was an important year for Uniqlo, as the opening of a flagship store in one of the hottest fashion districts of Tokyo projected the brand in Japan at a national level. At the product level, a partnership with Toray, one of the world's leading producers of composite and synthetic fibers, resulted in garments that had performance and properties no natural material could match. Working with Toray forced Uniqlo to refine its supply chain further, that became "just-in-time," mimicking that of other highly competitive Japanese companies. With an efficient but regional supply chain, Uniqlo faced rising manufacturing costs in China and was experimenting with new supply chain models in low-cost locations like Bangladesh. Uniqlo's supply chain had proved effective in the Asia Pacific region, but could the same model be scaled worldwide? Was the low growth rate Uniqlo experienced in the US, and particularly Europe, also due to the limitations of its current supply chain?

In 2008, the Multinational Natural Gas Pipeline Project was sponsored by China National Group Corporation to undertake a major international infrastructure project in Asia. The Pipeline Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of China National Group Corporation, established joint ventures with the host countries and took the lead in financing the project, which was required to be completed by the end of 2009. Initial investments and procurements were made, and payment would soon be due. However, there was a large gap between the estimated total investment and the funds available. Numerous banks expressed interest in the pipeline project, but most required the sponsor to provide a guarantee for the project's loan. Some banks also asked for an increase in the capital ratio from less than 1 per cent to 20 per cent. The treasurer responsible for the financing of the project was now tasked with the issue of arranging the most effective way to finance the project.

This case depicts a managerial problem faced by Tradition and Trust, a traditional sweet and snack manufacturer, which is 100-year old family business manufacturing, retailing and exporting sweets, snacks and other confectionery products. Like other traditional sweet and snack manufactures, the company is facing the challenge of consumers' shift towards 'healthy snacking'. Moreover, brands like Haldiram's and Bikanerwala are posing a tough competition to the traditional sweet manufacturing brands. In recent years, the brand has witnessed a decline in sales. In view of the challenges posed to brand, the Chief Marketing Officer, wants to understand the various factors influencing decline of sales and find ways to redesign the strategy for sustaining its current position in the market. The case is written to illustrate how six fundamental steps of conducting a marketing research can be used to address a given managerial problem.