Luisa Mazinter, the CMO of TymeBank in South Africa, was tasked in August 2019 with maintaining the country's first digital bank's rate of customer acquisitions, while increasing the account usage of their existing customers. Six months after the launch, TymeBank had been described as one of the fastest-growing digital banks in the world. Although the brand launch had been successful across a number of measures, Mazinter knew that maintaining this momentum in the coming year would present additional challenges. The dominant major banks were responding by reducing their fees, promoting new digital services and aggressively targeting TymeBank's target market. New entrants also presented a looming threat. The case requires students to identify Mazinter's marketing choices, analyze the emerging market environment, competitive positioning, and existing integrated marketing communications campaign, propose an appropriate allocation of marketing spend for September to December 2019, and recommend how TymeBank needed to evolve its marketing activities into 2020.

Rob Taylor, Founding Chairman, and Tracy Hackland, CEO of Columba Leadership, an award-winning South African non-profit organization, pondered a strategic question in March 2018. Columba Leadership was a non-profit values-based youth program that had facilitated individual change since 2009. By February 2018, Columba Leadership had organized 449 residential academy programs and graduated 5,211 high schoolers and 1,260 educators from 169 schools in some of the more disadvantaged areas. Columba Leadership had also pioneered the use of the Social Return on Investment methodology in South Africa. Columba Leadership's value proposition consisted of a six-day residential academy where high schoolers received training in 21st-Century leadership skills (critical thinking, leadership, problem-solving, communication, etc.) based on a framework of six values, including awareness, focus, creativity, integrity, perseverance, and service. Since its inception in 2009, Columba Leadership's focus had been on facilitating positive individual change. However, in 2017 Columba Leadership's executives observed how some schools, that they called "catalytic", had produced higher performance rates and the institutionalization of youth leadership after some of their students had attended Columbia Leadership academies. The systematic impact of these high schools prompted an internal reflection at the Board level, while the organization was also experiencing substantial pressure to change externally from funders. Should Columba Leadership keep its existing approach to youth development and focus on running more residential academies in a broader geographical area? Alternatively, was it time to re-evaluate the residential program and develop a more systemic approach that involved working more with schools in order to scale their impact? What were the key arguments in favor of the different approaches to scaling? What potential objections could the Board raise?