This case presents a scenario where Madrigal, a U.S. retailer with a rich 20-year history and a solid loyalty program, faces a turning point with the arrival of a new CEO. This leadership change reveals a critical gap in understanding the customer base, prompting an urgent audit of historical purchase data to assess customer growth patterns. Students are tasked as the CMO to analyze four years of transactional data, addressing questions on customer value, characteristics, and segmentation. The case study emphasizes the importance of a thorough customer-base audit to develop strategies for sustainable growth, serving as a practical learning tool for evaluating any company's customer base health.
In the autumn of 2018, Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD) was facing a changing and challenging environment. Fintech start-ups were a continuous source of disruption for the past decade, but some of the world's largest technology firms such as Google and Apple were entering the financial space and disrupting banking by disintermediating banks from their customers. TD had to prioritize which services and customer segments to protect from the industry's on-going digital disruption and develop strategies to protect them. TD had to move quickly as the longer the delay, the more opportunity the disruptors had to entrench themselves and siphon away customers. Tim Hogarth, Vice-President of Innovation Framework and Strategies, was leading TD's Innovation Council which was tasked with identifying solutions to the bank's technology challenges. The case focuses on understanding how and why disruption occurs and what an incumbent can do to protect itself. It provides the basis for applying Christensen's insights on disruption, the Diamond-E, Ansoff matrix, and applying the criteria for the make-versus-buy decision, i.e. acquire, partner with or internally develop new technologies.
How should companies launch products in times of uncertainty? Should they "wait and see"until uncertainty resolves -or commit to a full-scale launch and ride it out? Conventional wisdom says being early to market is the right choice, but that is not always the case. Many companies can benefit from a mixed, "act and see"approach.