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In The ClearZone (ClearZone), founded in 2020 by Jenessa and Madison Olson, was a sanitization service start-up that used ozone technology to disinfect commercial and residential spaces. The sisters started ClearZone when their existing business, STMNT, a successful online clothing rental business, was put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noticing a heightened need for disinfectant services in response to the pandemic, the sisters took the opportunity to use their business skills, build on their concerns for environmental sustainability, and support clients attempting to create safe environments. ClearZone experienced exponential growth and was now considering its next step in expanding the business.

Supplement for product W25263.

It was 2019, and the senior manager of strategy and business operations at Lyft Inc. (Lyft), headquartered in San Francisco, had been tasked with helping the company expand its existing vehicle services infrastructure to include individual riders, also known as end users, in addition to drivers. She had information about the competitive landscape within the industry, along with valuable insights from interviews Lyft had facilitated with potential customers. She was aware that in order for Lyft to grow and ultimately scale in as frictionless a manner as possible, the company might have to re-evaluate its value proposition and figure out how to build trust with consumers.

Presentation to accompany product W25384.

Rahul, a first year Master of Business Administration Student in a premier business school in India, encountered a misunderstanding while interacting with his study group, which met online due to COVID-19 restrictions in August 2020. He tried to resolve the misunderstanding, but instead, his attempt resulted in an escalation of the situation. Distressed over the misunderstanding and what he perceived as a breach of trust, he had lost his motivation to work with the group. Now, he is trying to reassess the situation and understand what went wrong, in an attempt to form a plan of action to mitigate the situation.

In June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the vice-president of sales and marketing at Priority Management, a hotel and resort management company, was overseeing the operations of two hotels. New England Hotel was a large corporate hotel that had successfully cultivated much of its business from corporations in the nearby corporate business park. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, hotel occupancy plummeted, and the hotel’s general manager was resisting changing strategy to address heightened fears amid uncertainty from the hotel’s staff. A “business as usual” strategy would inevitably result in the hotel closing and all staff members being laid off. Midwest Hotel was a major branded full-service hotel located outside the downtown area. The hotel had undergone several changes in leadership and rebranding, which the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated. The hotel manager was forced to drastically reduce the hotel’s staff and implement a new strategy before the hotel became unsavable.

CUBO Modular Inc. (CUBO) was a start-up social enterprise in the Philippines that emerged shortly after its chief executive officer, Earl Forlales, received a substantial cash award for besting 1,200 entries in a competition. The concept behind Forlales’s competition entry was the use of engineered bamboo to produce modular houses. The materials, design, and fabrication resulted in cheaper houses that could be used for mass housing projects.<br><br>The public gained awareness of CUBO from the various articles posted online about the competition, which were also posted on CUBO’s Facebook page. By 2021, interest in the well-designed CUBO houses had swelled, and the quantity of queries overwhelmed the CUBO team, resulting in its failure to respond to hundreds of queries posed by potential customers.<br><br>What should Forlales do to keep interest in CUBO products at a high level while managing its production capacity to meet consumer demand?

In 2016, a Black woman entrepreneur in Ajax, Ontario, Canada, in the greater Toronto area founded a small but successful venture named Kids Swag in response to a gap she identified in the children’s products market, which was failing to represent the Black community. The founder started her business while working as a full-time marketing professional. Kids Swag sold globally sourced products that featured positive Black personas and imagery in pop-up stores, local community events, and online through her social media account. Within four years, she exceeded her initial goals and found herself struggling to keep pace with the growing demand for her products. Her clientele grew from the local community and Facebook groups to international customers, large companies, and institutional clients such as retail outlets and school boards. By the end of 2020, the founder was wondering if she should open a physical store to complement her online presence and if she should leave her full-time career to devote herself fully to running her business. With warehouse space becoming increasingly limited and demand for her products continuing to grow, could she invest the necessary time and resources to take Kids Swag to the next level?

The elections for India’s 294-seat West Bengal (Bengal) Legislative Assembly were due to be held sometime in April–May 2021. The All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), which had been in power in the state since 2011, faced a tough challenge from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had been in power in the Central Government of India since 2014. The TMC and its political rivals in Bengal faced unprecedented social and political divisions among voters in 2021. To add to the TMC’s problems, at least half a dozen TMC stalwarts and many more local leaders had shifted to the BJP in the previous three months. In the run-up to the election, politicians across party lines used emotive issues such as religion, gender, and language to woo undecided voters. The TMC needed to devise a marketing strategy to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. Winning the maximum possible number of votes was the only item on the agenda.

In February 2019, the associate product owner of the Branch Rapid Labs at the Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank) was asked to provide his knowledge and expertise to develop the final iteration of a new customer onboarding process. The new model developed for Scotiabank, one of Canada’s Big Six banks, was named Project Fusion. Working closely with cross-functional teams, the associate product manager was advising his product team on how to best proceed after the completion of the final round of user testing trials. With all user trials on the latest prototype completed, he had a significant amount of feedback to analyze and results to implement in the project.

Designed as a coffee chain enabled by a digital platform, Luckin Coffee Inc. leveraged extensive customer behavior data gathered from its application (app), information systems, and technologies to offer innovative customer experience and high operational efficiency. Merging online with offline channels, this digital start-up quickly grew into a formidable competitor for Starbucks Corporation in China and became a star in the technology industry. Luckin was listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market in 2019, bringing additional capital to fuel its ambitious growth. However, in 2020, a report revealed a deep scandal, showing falsified financial and operational figures. The scandal could have a profound and far-reaching impact and offers lessons for the business world and beyond.

Presentation to accompany product W24874.

Yogesh Bellani was the chief executive officer of FieldFresh Foods Private Limited (FieldFresh), a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and Del Monte Pacific Limited. Bellani, with his entrepreneurial mindset, had successfully led FieldFresh in establishing the Del Monte brand in India. A great deal of that success was attributable to Bellani’s ability to capitalize on business-to-business sales. <br><br>FieldFresh had pivoted to a business-to-consumer (B2C) sales model, but issues that arose in fiscal year 2019–20 and were expected to be more pronounced in 2020–2021 indicated that an even greater emphasis on B2C sales was needed. The pivot to B2C would be crucial to unlocking the equity FieldFresh had built with the Del Monte brand and would enable the brand to take a leadership position in key categories, but was this the right time to make that change?

The Case describes how Penny Wise, the newly appointed managing director of 3M Canada, drew on her personal leadership style, experience and character to keep the Canadian organization strategically relevant through a significant restructuring and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2020, the chief innovation and strategy officer (CISO) of Amsterdam-based Koninklijke Philips NV (Philips), a global leader in health technology, was surveying the distance that Philips had traversed in its transition from products to platforms. The CISO faced three managerial dilemmas: How could he transform the long-standing functional orientation at Philips into a multidisciplinary alignment? How could he ensure that Philips’s customer-facing teams moved from a transactional mode to a relational mode? And how could he motivate employees to deal with a burning platform when they did not see one?

In February 2019, the owner of the Yukon Soaps Company (Yukon Soaps), based in Mayo, Yukon, was contemplating the path forward for her business. Founded in 1998, Yukon Soaps was a provider of hand-crafted artisanal soap featuring Indigenous artwork. Yukon Soaps had been experiencing double-digit annual sales growth over the past several years, and demand was steadily exceeding supply. The owner felt that her business had reached a critical point, and she knew it could not grow without addressing several pressing growth challenges, many unique to its northern context: (1) the cost of sourcing ingredients and shipping them via air freight to Yukon significantly drove up the cost of goods sold; (2) Yukon Soaps’ product was currently produced in the owner’s basement, which severely limited production capacity; (3) the business currently sold to Yukon retailers, directly to customers through fairs and farmers’ markets, and through an online e-commerce platform, and there were significant trade-offs associated with each sales channel. The owner’s primary goal was neither revenue nor profit growth, and as the challenges that came with growth threatened her primary goals and values, she was questioning the value of expanding the business. Should she expand Yukon Soaps, or should she remain a small-scale player? How could she address the unique challenges that she faced in Mayo, Yukon?

SATS Ltd., an airline service provider headquartered in Singapore, was the largest air cargo terminal operator at Singapore’s Changi Airport. As a key player in the Asia-Pacific region, it had built its reputation as one of the top air cargo terminal operators in the world. With meticulous strategic planning, it had developed technological capabilities to navigate through many challenges and stay ahead of its competitors. In 2019, multiple challenges were arising from the external factors that had transformed the nature of the global air cargo value chain. An impending labour crisis, coupled with changing customer expectations and the threat of substitutes, meant that the company faced a fresh set of challenges. To fight these challenges, it had to decide whether to further develop its automation capabilities or to focus on driving digitalization within its operations to improve its operational efficiency.

In April 2020, Yuno Learning Global Private Limited, an entrepreneurial venture that offered online training for International English Language Testing System examinations, wanted to optimize its digital marketing and increase the number of prospects who subscribed to the company’s program. The founder and chief executive officer had to decide among multiple marketing channels and funnels to choose the option that maximized value for the marketing effort, and he had to make that decision in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when all businesses were being affected by the move to online interaction.

In May 2019, a Vietnam-based entrepreneur was wondering which strategy would work best to sell nipa honey, the first product launched by his nipa palm products company, Viet Nam Nipa Development Company Limited (Viet Nipa). The product was launched in February 2019 and the entrepreneur had been selling the nipa honey at trade fairs, through partnerships with three popular resorts in his home district, and on a sales platform on Viet Nipa’s Facebook page. He was reaching out to grocery retailers in Vietnam with sale propositions, but to no avail. Should the entrepreneur continue to pursue business-to-consumer (B2C) distribution or leverage his company’s operational and manufacturing capabilities to shift to a business-to-business (B2B) operation? What was his target market and how should he tailor Viet Nipa’s marketing strategy and tactics to these consumers? Should he also consider taking nipa honey to the international market?

In 2019, the chairman and chief executive officer of Valeo, an automotive supplier and partner to automakers worldwide, faced the challenges of maintaining the company’s speed of growth and balancing its growth with profitability. Valeo had started as a small automobile component manufacturer in 1923 in France. By 2019, however, it was partnering with automakers to design innovative solutions for smart mobility with a focus on intuitive driving and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Valeo had grown not only organically, but also through partnerships and acquisitions, which enabled it to develop new technologies and new markets. What should the chairman and chief executive officer do to achieve the twin challenges of maintaining the company’s speed of growth and balancing growth with profitability, while not losing sight of the three current automotive revolutions—vehicle electrification, vehicle autonomy, and digital mobility?