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Supplement for Case ST63

Yuser Inc. (Yuser) was a new social networking start-up based in London, Ontario. Well-established social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube had begun to restrict social media influencers' monetization of their user base, and this had opened an opportunity for a new social media network to make three-way interactions among users, social media influencers (SMIs), and corporate sponsors completely stable and transparent. Yuser granted SMIs freedom in terms of the content they posted, allowing companies to identify influencers who helped their marketing efforts and to financially reward them using Yuser's cryptocurrency. Rather than facilitating two-way relationships, as most platforms did, Yuser would help build triangular relationships among companies, target markets, and SMIs. However, Yuser's business concept was complex, making it difficult for the company's chief operations officer to pitch Yuser's value proposition to external investors. In June 2018, she needed to find a delicate balance that would allow her to inform investors of the venture's potential without overwhelming them in a sea of confusing details.

In the summer of 2012, the president of the leisure sector of John Keells Hotels needed to discuss marketing strategies with his senior management team. The company was a well-known brand that operated Cinnamon Hotels and Resorts and Chaaya Hotels and Resorts in Sri Lanka and Maldives. Each of the two hotel brands catered to a different set of customers and offered different value propositions. After the terrorist conflict that had plagued Sri Lanka for 26 years had come to a dramatic close in May 2009, an influx of tourists was expected from both Western and Asian countries. The company had a great opportunity to strengthen its two hotel brands and capitalize on the growing global tourism market. Of the two hotel chains, Cinnamon Hotels and Resorts was the portfolio's luxury brand, whereas Chaaya Hotels and Resorts was the economy brand. The senior management team needed to design a brand architecture for the company that would offer a sound business solution and help the company's hotel sector find its rightful place in the global arena.

Zimmerli of Switzerland is a small Swiss brand that offers the highest quality underwear for men and women in the luxury segment. It has a loyal customer base including celebrities from all over the world. The case describes the dilemmas Zimmerli's CEO Marcel Hossli faced in January 2018, when deciding on Zimmerli's future strategy and how the company should continue to innovate to sustain brand desirability in a disrupted environment. In 2012, Zimmerli had decided to rely less on B2B distribution through wholesalers and to follow a multichannel strategy with direct sales channels (B2C). Since then, it has opened 15 mono-brand boutiques in Europe and Asia, as well as an e-commerce platform. As a result, Zimmerli grew 8% between 2011 and 2017. However, physical stores were expensive and impacted Zimmerli's net margin (0%-5%). Zimmerli faced the challenge of rejuvenating its customer base, without losing its traditional, older customers. In the past, Zimmerli had not invested much in advertising. Although it had a presence in various social media channels, it had few followers and not much user-generated content. Could Zimmerli attract new customers and gather data about their preferences on underwear through digital channels? So far, it had focused on product innovation by offering the highest quality products "Made in Switzerland." This USP came at a high cost and restricted further growth, due to production capacity constraints and a decline in suitable suppliers. Another challenge was Zimmerli's strategy of making investments out of cash flow only. The case stimulates discussion on how luxury brands can innovate along the customer journey using digital technologies. Zimmerli's strengths, its gaps, and its strategic options going forward can be explored using frameworks such as STEEP, Unique Competing Space (UCS) and the New Customer Journey.

This case presents the situation facing Tony Fernandes, the former Vice President of Warner Brothers, ASEAN region, in 2001, who had to decide whether to venture into the aviation business by acquiring an existing airline or drop the idea altogether. Fernandes was interested in starting a budget airline in Malaysia similar to low-cost airlines in the USA and Europe. He and his two close associates presented a proposal to Mahathir bin Mohammad, Malaysia's Prime Minister (PM), to start a low-cost airline. Mohammad rejected the proposal and suggested Fernandes to consider buying an existing airline. Conceptually it helps the participant to build the concept of entry through acquisition mode as opposed to entry through own creation. In the larger context, it involves the participants in evaluating a strategic opportunity for a new entrant.

In May 2017, an associate professor at Balsam State University (Balsam State), was reviewing the most recent evaluations for her fourth-year elective course, Field Forensics. While she knew that the term had not gone particularly well, she was still surprised by the poor ratings her course had received. This associate professor had been teaching at Balsam State for nearly seven years, and her elective course had previously scored well during evaluations. With only a few months to make changes to the course before the fall semester, she needed to glean what insights she could from the course evaluations and determine what changes, if any, she should make to her course.

In January 2018, the three founders of Lighting Enhancement Corporation (Lightenco), a Canadian turnkey lighting solutions enterprise, were at a crossroads. After building a successful business enterprise over seven years by relying entirely on internal financial sources, the founders of Lightenco now faced a difficult decision. Energy subsidies from the provincial governments of Quebec and Ontario had underpinned part of Lightenco's value proposition to customers, but these subsidy schemes were facing imminent termination in both provinces. Moreover, the financing option that Lightenco's three founders had deployed-relying on internally generated funds and not taking external capital-no longer seemed tenable, and moving to the next level of growth seemed to necessitate new and innovative financing options. Should the founders persist with the bootstrapping that had now become part of their entrepreneurial mindset? Or should they scale the business by either giving up equity or subsuming their operations in a merger with a larger firm? The founders were at a tipping point and had to decide which option to take.

Located in Bengaluru, India, Xoxoday.com was an online marketplace for experiential gifting. The company started by offering social gifting, and selecting corporations as its target market. In 2013, the company decided to cater to both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets and entered into the niche sector of experiential gifting. The value proposition of the start-up was to provide the best gifting solutions for customers while delivering an experience that would build memories. Heading into 2016, Xoxoday.com aimed to grow by acquiring new customers. It promoted its experiences extensively on social media platforms, but the company's hard work was not paying off. Xoxoday.com needed to figure out what changes needed to be made to its social media plan in order to attract new customers.

Sun Quan Education Inc. faced a variety of challenges on its path to expanding its customer base and building profitability through the operation of the We-GO club, a strategic business unit aimed at promoting education and training about the Go game in southern Ontario. Some of these challenges came from the low awareness of Go compared to other more popular intellectual products in Canada, the relatively late entry to the market of educational services, and more critically, the need for the company to develop a comprehensive and effective marketing plan starting with a clearly defined target segment. What was the right direction for the company's marketing plan?

DuckDuckGo, a late entrant in the search engine industry, was founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg with the main purpose of protecting users' online privacy and raising the standard of trust online. DuckDuckGo earned a reputation for being "the search engine that doesn't track you," and despite initial hurdles, by 2017, it had emerged as one of the top 10 search engines in the world. DuckDuckGo had managed to successfully leverage increasing privacy concerns amid accusations of tracking made against other search engines. Weinberg was now contemplating how to compete against organizations with massive resources and reach the maximum number of people who were concerned about privacy yet unaware of the existence of his search engine.

The case describes Cummins India's journey of implementing a large scale change to bring about gender diversity and inclusion (D&I) in their organization. The case underscores how this journey from 7% female representation (professional cadre) in 2005 to over 30% representation in the span of 12 years necessitated some tough decisions and a strong push by the top leadership. Now that Cummins India has been able to achieve a balance in their workforce gender representation, it faces the challenge of creating a strong systemic and cultural transformation for a truly inclusive culture.

The case centres around the challenges faced by Paytm, India's largest e-wallet, in its transition from a mobile wallet to a payments bank. The shift was the result of a push by Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the central bank of India and regulator of the banking system, in 2015, pending the approval of the new Payments Bill. The transition from Paytm mobile wallet to Paytm Payments Bank had added to the complexity of business for Paytm. Paytm Payments Bank had a target to increase its customer base from 180 million to 500 million by 2020. The road to achieving this target was far from smooth. Paytm Payments Bank had come under the scrutiny of RBI for not abiding by the prescribed Know Your Customer (KYC) norms and for the cashbacks it had offered customers to bring them on board. There were other regulatory challenges that Paytm Payments Bank had to deal with as well. One, the Supreme Court of India had struck down sections of the Aadhaar Act that required the use of Aadhaar cards for online verification and transactions. Two, regulatory uncertainty prevailed with new payments regulation, namely the Payments and Settlement Systems Act, 2018, looming on the horizon. And three, in October 2018, RBI had released guidelines on interoperability among prepaid instruments and bank accounts, creating barriers for the adoption of Paytm Payments Bank. It was in this challenging environment that Paytm Payments Bank had to acquire customers and persuade them to transact actively using its services and to grow from an online financial technology (FinTech) firm in the payments space to a one-stop destination for a FinTech firm in India. The case revolves around the future strategy and marketing tactics that Paytm Payments Bank would have to adopt to become self-sustainable and profitable in the face of various regulatory and customer adoption challenges.

Lean management-in manufacturing, supply chains, healthcare, services-has lost its way. Telling evidence of lean's dissolution shows up for inventory-intensive organizations in the form of worsening inventory numbers. My research of financial records of more than 1,500 global companies over 15 years shows growing inventories since the turn of the 21st century. Reduction of inventory is a concrete and visual marker of leanness and quicker customer response, while inventory growth is one of the more salient factors that degrades financial health. As to what has gone wrong with lean, the answer is nearly everything: ambiguous terms and concepts, trivializing the essence, botching the basics, going through the motions, analysis paralysis, puffery masking action, abetting organizational silos, discontinuity, and losing interest. This article addresses these in more specific terms with reference to key outcome measures, especially those most customer-relevant.

In April 2019, Asesh Sarkar, co-founder and chief executive of Salary Finance Limited, a London-based FinTech, faced tough choices. Sarkar had founded Salary Finance with Dan Cobley and Daniel Shakhani in 2015. The company's value proposition was quite simple: partner with employers to offer employees affordable loans that were repaid through automatic payroll deductions. Taking repayments directly from salary, and collecting those repayments in one transaction from the employer, dramatically reduced costs, saving employees large amounts of interest when compared to market alternatives like credit cards or payday lenders. For improving access to affordable credit, Salary Finance garnered considerable praise in the media, being named one of the UK's most socially responsible and innovative FinTech companies. Since the beginning of 2018, Salary Finance had introduced a savings product and an earned income advance product that were linked to employee salary. In September 2018, they expanded to the United States, in partnership with the United Way, opening an office in Boston, Massachusetts. Sarkar was excited by the progress but was still pondering how best to accelerate further growth and improve the business. First there was the question of geographic expansion. Did it make sense to pursue other markets like India? Or, should he focus on building Salary Finance's position in the UK and US? In these markets, should he prioritize attracting new employers to the platform or adding new products such as mortgages or investments? Should he register as a bank, tapping into low cost deposits and reducing the dependence on commercial borrowing to fund loans? Finally, he was concerned about how to best maintain Salary Finance's culture - "For People Not Numbers" - during rapid growth. These questions and more weighed heavily on Sarkar's mind as he considered the company's future.

The founder of Osaro saw the potential of deep reinforcement learning to allow robots to be applied in a wide range of new applications. Osaro targeted warehousing, already a dynamic industry for robotics and automation, for its initial product - a system which allowed robotic arms to "pick and place" individual items into boxes for shipment to consumers. Despite receiving significant attention in the robotics space, the problem of universal "picking" had not been solved. Osaro believed deep reinforcement learning would provide the solution by allowing robots to handle the complexity involved in perceiving and grasping a wide range of objects. The case discussion will focus on the decision to choose the warehouse automation market, provide an overview of key machine learning concepts, and introduce students to some of the contours of competing in the machine learning space during the late 2010s. The case also introduces key concepts for thinking about how the combination of artificial intelligence and robotics will change work in the future.

This case depicts a financial analyst trying to make sense of Starbucks' finances and drawing from recent projects of the IASB and FASB to identify lease accounting as a key issue for the firm. The case underscores the importance of having a full picture of a company's obligations in order to understand its overall performance. In reviewing the case, students examine Starbucks' extensive use of leases and use spreadsheet tools to understand the full extent of the corporation's indebtedness. Although heavy users of leases such as Starbucks have argued that lease accounting is complex, an estimation of lease indebtedness can be made using relatively simple tools that are easy for students to understand. The case allows issues of high-level accounting standards to be elucidated, using a well-known company with which students identify. The case illustrates the real-world consequences of accounting policy choices.

The case is based on the fixed income investment team at Value Partners Group Limited (VP), a publicly-listed, Hong Kong-based fund and asset management company founded in 1993, focusing primarily on Greater China and Asian investments and following an investing approach referred to as value investing. Set in December 2014, the cumulative returns from September to November 2014 for the Value Partners Greater China High Yield Income Fund (The Fund)-the firm's flagship fixed income fund-were negative. The year had started out slowly, but momentum picked up in the summer until a number of external events affected returns, including: Occupy Central in Hong Kong; the market's concern about the end of the US Federal Reserve's quantitative easing; Chairman Xi's anticorruption campaign in Beijing; and the Chinese property market suffering from excess inventory. Investors reacted to these events by pulling their money out of The Fund, and September returns for The Fund were down 2.2% for the month. The December bond market movement was drastic enough that Gordon Ip, Fixed Income Fund Manager for VP, and his team needed to react. Ip was under intense pressure to increase performance, since December was the last month of the year and investors would more closely scrutinize his performance. He needed to make a decision.

When the author began working at Match, in the mid-2000s, online dating often required monthly fees and endless patience. It was mostly done by middle-aged people sitting at PCs who scrolled through profiles and waited for responses. If they found and connected with someone, they'd often claim they "met through friends" to avoid the stigma that online dating carried. Since then, significant industrywide shifts in technology and business models have completely changed how people use Match products. Now online dating is done via apps on mobile phones; it has moved from monthly subscriptions to a "freemium" pricing model; and it has been embraced by people in their twenties, who are the dominant users of Tinder and similar brands. Mandy Ginsberg describes what it's like to lead in an industry with such fast innovation cycles and discusses incorporating full-motion video into dating apps--part of an effort to predict whether sparks ignited online will persist as chemistry in real life.