Early-stage, developing, and mature companies have different marketing needs, which means that a chief marketing officer with a set of skills well suited to a startup environment might not excel once the business scales. To help ensure that their chief marketing officer can succeed as their company grows, leaders can prepare and upskill the CMO, change their expectations of the CMO, or hire a new CMO who already has the needed skills.

Employer branding doesn't get the same attention as consumer branding, but its a critical way to attract talent to your organization. By following five steps identifying the talent you need, tuning in to talent perceptions and preferences, defining your employer proposition, communicating your brand, and keeping your promises you can enhance your employer brand and meet the challenge of talent acquisition.

This case provides a chronological view of Bud Light's sponsorship of Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, and the resulting impact. It helps students and executives consider both the decision-making process when working with influencers and other promotional partners and the steps that can be taken to minimize (and even prevent) the damage that can occur when a brand and business crisis results from a partnership. Students can explore the challenges associated with (1) identifying celebrities/influencers who align with a brand/consumer base/business and (2) managing reputational damage and crisis after it has occurred. The case offers opportunities for a deep dive into strategic partnerships, corporate response to crises, and marketing's role in preventing or minimizing negative consumer behavior. This case is well suited for undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA (EMBA), and executive education programs. For undergraduate students, it can be placed in a course on brand management, crisis management, brand activism, promotions, marketing strategy, management/leadership communication, or management strategy. For MBA and EMBA students, it can be placed in a first-year core marketing course or an elective on crisis management, management communication, management strategy, or brand management. At Darden, this case is used alongside two others: "Mickey Mouse Takes a Stand: Does Sociopolitical Activism Change the Disney Story?" (UVA-M-1031), and "Coke Puts Its Brand between a Rock and a Hard Place: Aligning Activism with Brand Purpose" (UVA-M-1019).

The unique needs of companies at different growth stages are best served by a marketing organization designed to meet the organization's goals and a CMO with the right skills. Early-stage companies need a scrappy generalist, developing companies need a scale specialist, and mature companies need a strategic marketing leader. Based on research and interviews with 100 CMOs, the authors identified three key traps in designing marketing organizations and ways to avoid them.

This field-based case introduces students to the challenges of building a professional brand through the lens of a college athlete. Since the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA's) landmark decision in 2021, college-level student athletes have been able to monetize their name, image, and likeness (NIL). Brian Gursky is finishing his collegiate pitching career at the University of Virginia after playing for four years at the University of Southern California and earning a business degree there. He hopes to play professional baseball, and his backup plan is to work in business. Gursky realizes that he might not have been fully leveraging social media to achieve either of his professional goals. Students investigate Gursky's tweets and assess what they communicate about him to potential scouts, coaches, NIL sponsors, and business recruiters. They learn that as athletes (and students) seek to become more professional, they need to use social media not as a vehicle to communicate with friends but as an advertising and promotion platform to establish their athlete or professional brands. This case is well suited for undergraduate and graduate (e.g., MBA) courses in core marketing, marketing strategy, sports marketing, sports management, advertising, promotion, strategic partnerships/alliances, brand management, or brand strategy. It can also be used in executive education courses to help business leaders identify, analyze, and recommend improvements in leveraging social media to build a professional brand. Finally, athletic departments can use it to introduce collegiate athletes to the rules and protocols for conducting themselves appropriately in today's high-pressure collegiate sport environment.

This case introduces the challenges and decision criteria for businesses seeking to sponsor student athletes in the advent of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA's) landmark decision to authorize collegiate student athletes to monetize their name, image, and likeness (NIL), just as professional athletes and other celebrities have always done. The case follows Jonathan Cotten, president of Easy Step Enterprises (Easy Step), a franchisee for the Good Feet Store based in Richmond, Virginia, as he explores the possibility of using college athletes from the University of Virginia (UVA) as social media influencers to stimulate demand for the Good Feet Store locations his company operates. The primary focus of this case is not on franchisee-franchisor relations, but rather on the strategic decision processes a business must consider when exploring the emerging opportunity to engage college student athletes as social media influencers. Because of their youth and relative inexperience, college student athletes pose different challenges and issues compared to the longer-established engagement of professional athletes and celebrities in similar roles. This case highlights these differences and encourages careful integration of criteria for executing these decisions.

This technical note follows F. D. Wilder, who is being tasked with driving the Procter and Gamble's digital transformation effort. The cornerstone of the transformation would be "assessing and improving the digital capability of the firm." He decides to develop an assessment tool that would enable P&G's brand leaders to assess "digital ability" and then work with their bosses to create learning plans to address ability gaps.

Transformational efforts require employees to work in new and unfamiliar ways. Generic knowledge and skills aren't enough to ensure that they can do this new digital-focused work. Leaders should follow the example of P&G's successful digital transformation and bolster employee ability by connecting knowledge and skills to targeted actions and performance outcomes.

This case presents the Walt Disney Company's (Disney's) involvement in Florida House Bill 1557, the Parental Rights in Education Act, known by opponents as the "Don't Say Gay" bill. It can be used to help students consider activism from a multi-stakeholder perspective and the potential consequences of engagement to a company's brand image (i.e., reputation) and business. The case presents a chronology of the events and company statements as the firm responded to consumer and organizational actions, enabling students to explore the challenges associated with: (1) aligning activism with brand purpose, (2) engaging in activism in a way that strengthens the consumer-brand relationship, (3) managing activism that may create conflict between two or more stakeholders (e.g., employees and consumers), and (4) aligning activism efforts with business growth. Consequently, the case offers opportunities to dive deeply into brand activism, corporate responses to activism, and marketing's role in advocating for consumers and protecting the brand.

This exercise is designed to give students an opportunity to develop a communications plan and press statement for The Coca-Cola Company (Coke) as it attempts to navigate the 2021 Georgia voting law controversy. Specifically, it asks students to assume the role of chief marketing and communications officer (CMCO) at Coke and recommend a communications plan, including a press statement, to fulfill their role as CMCO while living up to the brand's purpose and values statements. This exercise helps students understand: (1) the challenge associated with making corporate communications decisions in a way that aligns with brand purpose and helps drive growth, and (2) the difficulty of navigating hot-button issues. This exercise can be used as a stand-alone activity or as the second part in a two-part series. If used as the second part of the series on aligning brand activism, brand purpose, and growth, the case "Coca-Cola Puts Its Brand Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Aligning Activism with Brand Purpose" (UVA-M-1019)[1] enables students to take different stakeholder perspectives and consider potential decisions. This exercise then provides an opportunity for students to activate the strategic decision made in the case as they are asked to develop an action plan and press statement for Coke. This exercise is well suited for undergraduate, MBA, MBA for executives (EMBA), and Executive Education programs. For undergraduate students, it can be taught in a brand management, capstone marketing strategy, management communications, or a management strategy course to help students learn how challenging it is to align and implement activism and brand purpose. For MBA/EMBA students, it can be used in a first-year core marketing course or in a leadership communication, strategy, or brand management elective.

This case presents The Coca-Cola Company's (Coke's) involvement in the controversial Georgia voting bills. It can be used to explore brand purpose and activation of purpose through activism. Presenting a chronology of Coke's statements as the firm responded to consumer and organizational actions, the case enables students to explore the challenges associated with the following: 1) aligning activism with brand purpose, 2) engaging in activism in a way that strengthens the consumer-brand relationship, and 3) aligning activism efforts with business growth. Consequently, the case offers opportunities to dive deeply into brand activism, brand purpose design, and brand activation, as well as corporate response to consumer activism. The case includes proprietary information about Coke's purpose, beliefs, and values that can provide the basis for a compelling discussion. This case is well suited for undergraduate, MBA, MBA for executives (EMBA), and Executive Education programs. For undergraduate students, it can be placed in a course in brand management, capstone marketing strategy, management/leadership communication, or management strategy, introducing the concept of aligning brand actions with brand purpose. For MBA/EMBA students, it can be placed in a first-year core marketing course, management communication course, management strategy course, or brand management elective. In Executive Education programs, the case can help firm leaders proactively think about how to engage in controversial issues that divide consumers, shareholders, and employees. Coke appears to be caught flat-footed, reacting rather than leading from a clear point of view. This case enables executives to think about how they might manage such a situation before it arises.

This technical note will help provide insight on what a brand purpose is, why it matters, and how companies can vary in their design and application of brand purpose. Since the concept of brand purpose is an emerging idea, growing in importance within the academic and practicing communities, we hope this technical note will inspire a deeper reflection and discussion that will lead to greater understanding of brand purpose best practices.

This case provides students with a rare opportunity to understand the relationship between brand positioning design and delivery. While strategic challenges are often attractive to students, this case helps reinforce the importance and difficulty associated with implementing strategy effectively. In the A case (UVA-M-1004), students had to integrate consumer, competitor, company, and brand image data to arrive at a desired brand positioning. In this case, students must take their desired positioning strategy and activate it by redesigning the campus presentation provided to prospective employees. To do this, they will have to identify the strongest, most compelling way to use P&G's distinguishing attribute information to communicate the brand strategy through a PowerPoint presentation.

This case provides students with an opportunity to analyze and define a desired positioning for Procter & Gamble's (P&G's) US employer brand. In addition to enabling students to actively engage in assessing and creating a brand positioning, this case gives students a rare opportunity to analyze the type of brand image data that brand managers use. Considered highly confidential, few cases enable students to see and interpret such data. Finally, this case provides insight into a type of branding-employer branding-for which there is little public information as it has only recently come into vogue.

This technical note outlines what an employer brand is, how it relates to a consumer brand, and why it matters. It allows students to be able to put their knowledge to the test by evaluating the attribute ratings among seven different top employer brands. Finally, they will have a better understanding of how to assess, build, and enhance a company's employer brand.

For decades, Western executives of multinational brands seeking to expand globally have operated under a simple premise: Marketing content and channel selection should be customized to local markets, but Western marketing principles are universal. Firms are particularly quick to export media and ad strategies to developing markets, where advertising and media are more recent developments. Meanwhile, Chinese marketers have developed a unique approach tailored to China's mobile-first consumer. It relies on the creation of shareable, viral content and the presence of dominant, channel-straddling media giants. It is faster and cheaper and often more effective than the Western marketing paradigm. It also is more embracing of risk. For companies that hope to enter China or grow existing operations there, understanding the Chinese marketing mindset will be essential to achieving success. This article examines the adjustments Western companies must make to succeed in China--and around the world.

While the importance of developing a superior brand is a common goal across firms, a key challenge marketers face is the measurement of a brand. What does it mean to measure a brand? It is about the worth of the brand? Is it about the target consumer's perception? Or is it about how well known the brand is? The purpose of this tech note is to: (1) create a conceptual model framing the ways in which brands can be measured, (2) describe the key measurement methods, and (3) provide commonly used examples for each measurement method.

While there are a number of courses focused on helping students create and perfect innovative new products, there remains a gap regarding how to create and perfect the idea-or the positioning behind the product. The reality is that it is significantly more difficult than most people think to create a superior positioning concept. In addition, most sophisticated marketing organizations begin with a winning idea before they begin to deploy R&D resources to create a product. This note helps students understand what a positioning concept is, the critical elements of a testable positioning concept, and the attributes of those concepts that tend to be superior to those of their rivals. It is useful for undergraduate and graduate students interested in marketing, sales, brand management, and entrepreneurship.

Ashton Thyme's, an upscale furniture boutique in Athens, Georgia, has been granted exclusive territory to sell antique-reproduction furniture from Country Market Collection. But a customer has found the same Country Market Collection products Ashton Thyme's carries for a lower price online. The customer offered Ashton Thyme's the opportunity to match the online price, which the manager declined. This situation prompts an angry call from the manager to the owner of Country Market Collection, arguing that sales to websites infringe on Ashton Thyme's exclusive territory rights.

This year, chief marketing officers (CMOs) will spend more money on IT than chief information officers (CIOs). This rapid shift in responsibility is creating a growing divide between CIOs and CMOs over firms' IT investment decisions and actions, which is of increasing significance to firm performance. Understanding and managing this CIO-CMO divide is important in light of the magnitude of investment involved-global IT spending is estimated to exceed $4.1 trillion by 2018-and CEOs' belief that technology is a critical success factor for future firm performance. Heretofore, there has been little investigation regarding the unique relationship between the CMO and CIO. The research reported herein addresses this shortcoming by revealing the results of in-depth interviews with CMOs and CIOs across multiple industries. The results identify the nature and sources of conflict between the two roles as well as the management-related mechanisms to overcome them, revealing the need for CEOs to focus on managing four specific sources of CMO-CIO conflict: perspective, goals, accountability, and structural conflict. While the CEO has the power to create the management-related mechanisms that promote greater CMO-CIO alignment, we also detail steps that the functional leaders can take to put the mechanisms in place should the CEO fail to do so.