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On July 1, 2020, the co-head of the logistics and planning department at Marico Ltd., based in India, was reviewing reports on various issues related to stock inventory and warehousing. After studying the reports, he found that both lost opportunity and warehousing costs for the company were high. Compounding the problem was the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which had added pressure to the company’s impending cost pressures. Initially, Marico Ltd. had thirty-three warehouses. However, after the Government of India introduced the Goods and Service Tax in 2017, various state taxes across the country were eliminated. The new law revolutionized the logistics industry and allowed Marico Ltd. to reduce the number of its warehouses to twenty-five. Could the company further reduce the number of warehouses without adversely impacting service levels?

In 2021, the chief executive officer of Cocoa Luxury SA moved back to Switzerland and founded his premium chocolate brand, SwissOne, after spending two decades in Australia manufacturing confectionery products. Growing up in Bern, Switzerland—the location of the original Toblerone factory—had inspired his unique chocolate recipe and the first three chocolate bars he intended to sell. In January 2022, once he had finished his prototypes, to finalize his marketing plan, the CEO had to consider three questions: First, what was his overall marketing strategy? Second, what was the Swiss business environment like, and how competitive was the Swiss chocolate industry? And third, how could he best position his SwissOne brand, and what should the marketing mix look like?

Alice Moore worked remotely as a full-time senior data associate for Bloom Inc., a global technology firm in the United States. The department in which Moore worked was restructured while she was on maternity leave; yet despite having a strong performance record, Moore received neither a promotion nor a pay increase, while some colleagues did. She returned from her maternity leave in June 2018, and regardless of more than a year of emails and meetings with managers, Moore’s concerns about her role in the restructured department were not resolved. In August 2019, Moore was preparing for her final meeting with a manager and needed to decide how best to advocate for her career concerns within Bloom.

New opportunities, challenges, and decisions arose for a pub owner and his business partners when celebrity Halle Berry raved on social media about the hot wings served at the pub. Berry's post sparked an unprecedented 28-day sellout and a firestorm of news coverage that kept the business going at a time when the restaurant industry was suffering from government-imposed restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pub owner and his partners wonder whether to seize momentum and enter the fiercely competitive packaged goods industry, bottling and selling their signature wing sauces.

Student Spreadsheet for product 9B20E002.

In late 2020, the board of the Edmonton Community Foundation (ECF) was preparing for its strategic planning session. The question on the agenda was, Should the ECF target millennials or baby boomers for its endowment development tools and strategies? Board members were of two minds when it came to millennials. Some members believed the ECF should intensify its efforts among baby boomers, as time was running out on this donor demographic. Others believed the ECF’s relationships with baby boomers were strong and that it was now time for the ECF to begin actively courting a new generation of donors.<br><br/>Nneka Otogbolu, the newly appointed director of communications and equity strategy for the ECF, was working on her presentation for the board. Her team had carefully researched the two options, leaving it to her to decide what the recommendation should be. She would need to make her mind up soon, as the board meeting was in two days.

Founded in 1984, United Safety & Survivability Corporation (USSC) was an American company headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania, that began in a garage with just a few products and a dream to develop better and safer transportation solutions. Like most firms, as COVID-19 started to spread in the United States and around the globe, USSC found itself in uncharted waters. The transportation sector, in which USSC operated, was among the most affected by the pandemic as people stopped using public transportation or were confined to their homes. The uncertainty regarding the transportation industry’s future was as substantial as the drop in demand caused by the pandemic. USSC’s chief executive officer found himself in a difficult situation, as the company would soon run out of money. At the same time, there were no clear answers yet to fundamental questions about the industry’s future. USSC's leadership team had to quickly decide on both short-term (tactical) responses to COVID-19 and long-term (strategic) decisions, including decisions about its product portfolio and research and development strategy.

In 2016, just four years after launching their business, the four founders of Campus Sutra (a youth-oriented online fashion brand) had to decide whether to join an online marketplace’s brand accelerator program. Joining the program promised rapid growth, but the exclusivity clause was risky. How should the founders evaluate the lucrative proposal? Nurturing high-quality private labels through support programs that accelerated the growth of exclusive brands seemed to help the platforms enhance customer engagement, but was the promise of support from the online marketplace worth the restrictions of platform exclusivity?

Recent years had witnessed the social phenomenon of the rise of Internet brands. Looking at Internet fitness unicorn brand Keep’s brand commercialization process, Keep demonstrated the path of creation, product adjustment and upgrade, and brand extension logic of Internet app brands. Keep started as a single-tool app providing exercise content and data records, and gradually developed into a one-stop fitness and exercise platform by actively adjusting its brand goal, surpassing similar products to become the largest social platform for exercise in China. Keep then went through a bottleneck period where it had huge traffic but could not monetize it. Finally, Keep pursued commercialization, transforming into a comprehensive ecological fitness chain. Now, in April 2021, how would Keep respond to the competition and continue its strategic vision of providing a fitness ecosystem? Should its strategic focus continue to shift from online to offline? What should Keep’s next steps be?

Malabar Gold & Diamonds (Malabar) was established in 1993 in Kerala, India. By 2019, the company was a leading retail chain in India's jewellery market and one of the top five jewellery businesses in the world, selling their products through 117 Indian outlets and 143 global outlets across nine countries. Most of Malabar's domestic revenue came from the southern region of India, and the company was looking to extend its footprint across the entire Indian market. However, the country's jewellery market was highly competitive, with a strong presence of regional players, and consumers in each Indian state had their own unique preference for jewellery design. Malabar needed to find a strategy to expand its presence into the country's uniquely different geographic areas.

Hisense Group Co. Ltd. (Hisense) was a leading manufacturing enterprise in the Chinese household appliance industry. In 2010, Hisense began to lay out its online channels. At that time, the same products had different prices in different channels, which caused fierce channel conflicts. To solve this problem, Hisense segmented online and off-line products and took a series of actions to help off-line channels improve efficiency and reduce prices. Therefore, Hisense successfully changed from having different prices for the same products to having different prices for different products. However, in early 2020 the new model was challenged again, and channel conflicts soon reappeared. How would Hisense break the recurring channel conflict this time?

Benny Chung-Ying Zee was a professor at a prestigious university in Hong Kong and founder of Health View Bioanalytic Limited (Health View). Health View offered fast, inexpensive, non-invasive assessments of the risk of stroke and Alzheimer’s disease by using artificial intelligence and automatic retinal image analysis (ARIA) of pictures of patients’ retinas using fundus cameras. While Health View was breaking even, Zee realized that it was not yet a success. Thus, Zee was considering how to scale up the company to realize the impact of its technology. Zee had to assess the current business model—its value proposition, target market, sales channels, and strategic partners—and determine how he could scale up and redirect Health View.

In May 2019, ByteIQ Analytics was formed in India, with the idea to revolutionize finance through the potential of data. In the beginning, ByteIQ offered data science and analytics capabilities in the form of various services. But the founders aspired to make ByteIQ a product company so they created their first product, BankStorii, in December 2021. BankStorii was designed to aid financial customers to select the best banking products. ByteIQ’s chief executive officer had two choices in selecting a suitable business model for BankStorii: make BankStorii available to the country's masses free of charge through a website platform or make BankStorii a proprietary software and license it to banks.

On the morning of October 9, 2021, almost all newspapers in India carried the news of the re-privatization of Air India. They celebrated the move by the Government of India to hand back the airline to its original owner, the Tata group. Tata Airlines was founded in 1932 as India’s first airline. The Government of India nationalized the airline in 1953. In October 2021, nearly seven decades after its nationalization, Tata Sons and the Tata group, through its wholly owned subsidiary, Talace Private Limited, acquired Air India again, bringing a halt to the years of effort by the government to re-privatize the national carrier. The re-privatization gave the Tata group full control of Air India and its low-cost airline, Air India Express, and a 50 per cent stake in Air India SATS Airport Services Private Ltd (AISATS), the airport and cargo-handling service company. <br><br>However, the restoration of Air India as a renowned, profit-making airline was an uphill battle accompanied by myriad challenges. The Tata group ran two airlines in India: Tata SIA Airlines Limited (operating as Vistara), in which it held a 51 per cent stake; and Capital A Berhad (operating as AirAsia) with an 80 per cent stake. In financial year 2020–21, both airlines incurred significant losses. The responsibility of rebuilding Air India at such a precarious juncture could have become yet another adaunting task for the Tata group. Did the Tata group make the right move by acquiring Air India? What should the Tata group do to make Air India regain its lost glory, and how should it prioritize what needed to be addressed to achieve this? How could Air India overcome the industry- and company-level challenges it faced?

With crowds once again packing sporting events, theatres, and restaurants, business leaders must effectively communicate to employees what their work lives will look like in the days and months ahead if social distancing doesn’t return. After two years of operating remotely, rushing decisions about the future of work to keep up with the rapid loosening of restrictions is indeed the wrong way to go. With some forethought and planning, along with early and frequent communication, companies can get the return of employees to work right, avoid costly lawsuits, and usher in a new era in employee relations. But first there are a lot of questions to answer: 1) How will you mitigate COVID-related risk? 2) How much flexibility will you offer? 3) How will you approach business travel? 4) How will you support employee mental health? 5) How will you support workforce equality? 6) How will you support your new policies? The days of rigid schedules or constant face time have passed. To keep your best people, you need to give them some ability to custom design their work lives. So, rather than dictating where they work and when they do it, seize the opportunity to build more trust by measuring your employees on their output and value. This will help keep them happy, healthy, refreshed, and productive.

In May 2021, Claire Reid, the founder of social enterprise start-up Reel Gardening, spoke about her ambitious ten-year plan to help secure nutritious food for impoverished people in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. Reel Gardening produced and sold a paper strip packed with seeds and fertilizer. Although the company had grown significantly, it had to manage the dual mission of social contribution and financial sustainability. The company had to determine whether expansion would shift it away from its social mission. Should Reid pursue an ambitious growth strategy, or should she keep the company small, grow it slowly, and focus on the larger social impact? Going forward, how should the company manage its growth, both strategically and financially?

On January 4, 2021, Mike Patriquin was contemplating the tumultuous year of 2020 and the impact it had had on operations at Hell’s Basement Brewery (HBB), the first brewery to open in Medicine Hat, Alberta, since the early 1900s. Recent events both within and outside the brewery had affected his business. Management had recently restructured financially after buying out some of the original partners, and the remaining owners and management were still dealing with the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The brewery had also had some unexpected media coverage. Patriquin was considering the next steps for HBB given the volatile nature of the industry in these unprecedented times.

Dr. Jay Jayson, an orthodontist, had recently completed renovating the waiting area of his office and now needed to decide whether he should also renovate the treatment areas. He considered the advantages and disadvantages of his current clinic setup: he thought that the reception environment was comfortable, and that the patients felt confident in the treatment and process, but he was concerned about the impact on patients of any delays in care. He also realized that he had one new patient consultation room that could be pulled into service as a treatment chair. Would hiring more registered dental assistants help him treat more patients? Was there another way to see more patients without renovating the office?

Fast Retailing Co. Ltd.’s UNIQLO brand (UNIQLO) was planning to relaunch +J, its collaboration with the legendary high-end designer Jil Sander in the fall of 2020; however, the COVID-19 pandemic began in March of that year, causing many consumers to spend less on clothes and more on essentials. Just like the first launch of the +J collection in 2009, this launch would once again happen during a global recession. The affordable street fashion brand faced a challenging decision regarding whether to reintroduce the higher-priced collaboration brand amidst this unprecedented situation.

Presentation for product W26091.