個案總覽

Wei Song oversees Greater China for Rochat & Schmid, a 100-year-old Swiss maker of luxury timepieces. China is a critical market for the firm, but sales of watches have stalled there. The firm's competitors are going after China's luxury shoppers, who are younger and flashier than the traditional customer base, with new gem-encrusted products that offer "bling." To compete with them, Pearl Zhang, Song's VP of marketing, wants to launch a campaign featuring a Chinese singer with a huge social media following among Millennials. But Simon Carbonnier, R&S's chief creative officer back in Switzerland, is dead set against celebrity endorsements and anything that deviates from the brand's long-term value of "understated elegance." Should Song fight for Pearl's new campaign--or not? Expert commentary on this case study is provided by Kent Wong and Martin Ganz.

Wei Song oversees Greater China for Rochat & Schmid, a 100-year-old Swiss maker of luxury timepieces. China is a critical market for the firm, but sales of watches have stalled there. The firm's competitors are going after China's luxury shoppers, who are younger and flashier than the traditional customer base, with new gem-encrusted products that offer "bling." To compete with them, Pearl Zhang, Song's VP of marketing, wants to launch a campaign featuring a Chinese singer with a huge social media following among Millennials. But Simon Carbonnier, R&S's chief creative officer back in Switzerland, is dead set against celebrity endorsements and anything that deviates from the brand's long-term value of "understated elegance." Should Song fight for Pearl's new campaign--or not? Expert commentary on this case study is provided by Kent Wong and Martin Ganz.

Wei Song oversees Greater China for Rochat & Schmid, a 100-year-old Swiss maker of luxury timepieces. China is a critical market for the firm, but sales of watches have stalled there. The firm's competitors are going after China's luxury shoppers, who are younger and flashier than the traditional customer base, with new gem-encrusted products that offer "bling." To compete with them, Pearl Zhang, Song's VP of marketing, wants to launch a campaign featuring a Chinese singer with a huge social media following among Millennials. But Simon Carbonnier, R&S's chief creative officer back in Switzerland, is dead set against celebrity endorsements and anything that deviates from the brand's long-term value of "understated elegance." Should Song fight for Pearl's new campaign--or not? Expert commentary on this case study is provided by Kent Wong and Martin Ganz.

My Kind of Cakes (MKOC), a cake boutique in Ghaziabad, India, had carved a niche for itself with its unique bakery products, quality food, and excellent service, all offered at a reasonable price. Within five years of opening, the business had flourished, growing in worth from ?7.2 million in 2012 to ?19.5 million in 2016. In January 2017, the owner of the cake shop pondered his strategies for achieving his target revenue of ?50 million by 2020. He wondered if he should expand geographically and open franchises in nearby towns or if he should increase his product range. Should he build a digital platform to increase awareness of his brand or launch a loyalty program to strengthen MKOC’s customer relationships? If so, how should he build such a program? Since he had also been asked to photograph special occasions such as baby showers, he wondered whether he should add theme photography to MKOC's offerings.

This case scenario is based on a real company (with name disguised and artificial but representative data) that uses search engine advertising, running paid search ads on the two major search engines, Google and Bing. Students are presented with weekly traffic data for both Google and Bing and are asked to perform an ROI analysis for the company. Solution Notes are available for both student and instructor use for this case.

Nonprofits are facing a growing challenge to retain donors. At a time when acquiring a new donor is three times as expensive as retaining an existing donor and donor attrition stands at an all-time high, nonprofits are looking to increase the lifetime value of their donors. This case presents a new means by which nonprofits can induce donors to give today and commit to giving in the future. The positive results of a low-cost, high-yield experiment conducted at GlobalGiving, one of the largest nonprofit organizations in the United States, demonstrate how seemingly small increases in the numbers of recurring donors can have a significant impact on revenue, allowing nonprofits to have an even greater philanthropic impact. This case allows for discussions on how field experimentation on crowdfunding platforms can help with the development of new business approaches and how those novel approaches can be implemented in a way that would satisfy multiple stakeholders, ranging from donors to large and small charity partners.

In 2014, KT Corporation, one of South Korea's leading telecommunications companies, successfully mapped each point of a customer's interactions with the company. This was done by a team whose function was to identify customers' pain points, known as critical quality parameters. The customers' experiences were clustered into key areas of contact and customer satisfaction in each area was assessed, allowing quality innovation to be experience-based. Identifying customers' unmet needs and developing innovative solutions were already leading to dramatic improvements in customer experience. However, more work needed to be done, especially in encouraging staff to take actions for improvement.

In June 2015, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) India was considering its future in the Indian telecom market. MTS India, a global telecommunications (telecom) brand, had been operating in the country since March 2009. It had gone through difficult phases marked by India's regulatory regime and the global economic crisis. Although the Indian telecom market had immense potential, MTS India's success was stifled by a lack of telecom resources and in the inability to successfully manage the macro environment. Over the years, the company had adopted multiple strategies to drive business growth. However, due to the incompatible telecom ecosystem, including technology and devices, the company was not able to achieve its intended objectives in India. The chief executive officer was evaluating several strategic options in light of intense competition and a geopolitical crisis faced by MTS India's parent company in Russia.

In 2014, KT Corporation, one of South Korea’s leading telecommunications companies, successfully mapped each point of a customer’s interactions with the company. This was done by a team whose function was to identify customers’ pain points, known as critical quality parameters. The customers’ experiences were clustered into key areas of contact and customer satisfaction in each area was assessed, allowing quality innovation to be experience-based. Identifying customers’ unmet needs and developing innovative solutions were already leading to dramatic improvements in customer experience. However, more work needed to be done, especially in encouraging staff to take actions for improvement.

In June 2015, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) India was considering its future in the Indian telecom market. MTS India, a global telecommunications (telecom) brand, had been operating in the country since March 2009. It had gone through difficult phases marked by India’s regulatory regime and the global economic crisis. Although the Indian telecom market had immense potential, MTS India’s success was stifled by a lack of telecom resources and in the inability to successfully manage the macro environment. Over the years, the company had adopted multiple strategies to drive business growth. However, due to the incompatible telecom ecosystem, including technology and devices, the company was not able to achieve its intended objectives in India. The chief executive officer was evaluating several strategic options in light of intense competition and a geopolitical crisis faced by MTS India’s parent company in Russia.

The Renault KWID was successfully launched in India in the entry-level car segment as a new competitor for the Maruti Suzuki Alto, the largest-selling passenger car in the country. By August 2016, the market leader’s market share had fallen to 40.6 per cent from 48.5 per cent earlier that year, while the Renault KWID gained a market share of about 19.8 per cent. Despite the KWID’s remarkable success, however, Renault’s strategy for the future needed to consider two major issues: competitive strategy for market leaders versus market disruptors, and product portfolio analysis and performance. Renault also needed to consider the threat other new entrants might pose. Should the company create a strategy to manage new entrants that might follow Renault’s own successful launch? Renault also had to consider the strength of its portfolio. Was it likely to generate more successful launches in the future or was the KWID just a rare occurrence?

Luminopia-a start-up founded in January 2016 by three Harvard College freshmen-uses virtual reality technology to treat amblyopia (more commonly called "lazy eye"), the single biggest cause of visual disorders among children. By February 2017, the three founders had raised $950,000 in angel funding and developed a prototype of their virtual reality product, which was in use in clinical trials at Boston Children's Hospital. As the founders prepare to bring their new medical device to market, they struggle with two key decisions: Should Luminopia create its own salesforce to sell its product or should it outsource? And how should the company price its device to maximize returns yet remain attractive to doctors, insurance providers, and individual patients?

Kaya Skin Clinic (Kaya) was started in India in 2002. It expanded its operations to the Middle East in 2003. The company’s value proposition was to provide medical advice from a dermatologist, which formed the basis for product and service recommendations that would dramatically improve customers’ skin. The company had worked hard to position the Kaya brand through defined e-marketing and customer relationship management strategies; however, in 2015, Kaya needed to consider whether combining expertise, customized solutions, and a friendly environment would continue to work for the brand, or whether it was time to revamp and redefine the Kaya brand in the Middle East.

In recent years, word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing has been the subject of considerable interest among managers and academics alike. However, there is very little common knowledge on what drives the value of WOM programs and how they should be designed to optimize value. Firms therefore frequently rely on relatively simple metrics to measure the success of their WOM marketing efforts and mainly use rules of thumb when making crucial program design decisions. This article proposes a new method to measure WOM program value that is based on the impact of WOM on the firm's customer equity. It then provides recommendations for the five main questions managers face when planning a WOM program: Who to target? When to launch the program? Where to launch it? Which incentives to offer? and How many participants to include?

By 2016 the explosion of digital advertising was a global phenomenon. And many industry observers believed that programmatic advertising, that is digital advertising allocated through automated marketing systems, was the future of digital advertising. In a programmatic advertising environment, buyers and sellers of online (digital) advertising connected over an exchange buying and selling available inventory. For advertisers, programmatic marketing offered the promise of less costly and more targeted and effective placements. This Primer discusses the programmatic advertising eco-system and the challenges inherent in negotiating this system (e.g., the persistence of ad blocking and the threat of fraud)-as well as future growth opportunities for programmatic advertising.

From Canada to Australia, Denmark to Singapore, governments are embracing insights from Behavioural Economics to improve the lives of their citizens. The authors describe the basics of 'Choice Architecture' and show that testing different 'nudges' with users provides an outlet to review the status quo and improve interactions with the public.

The standard economic view suggests that people will commit to an action if the expected benefits outweigh the costs. But the authors show that this model is incomplete in an important way: It overlooks how actions come to mind. Before you weigh the costs and benefits of an action, what cognitive processes lead you to think of it in the first place? They show that, if we can understand what leads people to consider a particular action, we can design interventions that lead them to think of different possibilities.

In our daily lives we frequently face a tension between what we want to do (i.e. what we desire) and what we believe we should do. The authors summarize the key findings on 'want/should conflict' and discuss a series of interventions that policymakers, organizations, and individuals can use to promote more future-oriented, should choices. In the end, they show that the better we understand want/should conflict, the more successful we will be at designing effective interventions that shift behaviors in societally-beneficial directions.

Delta Plastics of the South developed a new software product, Pipe Planner, which was complementary to its core product, Polytube, used by farmers to irrigate crops in the delta region of Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Pipe Planner helped farmers by calculating, for any particular field, the size of pipe needed, how to punch holes in the pipe and how long to irrigate. Using the software could lower the farmer's cost of irrigating by up to 25 percent particularly through savings of fuel and time. It also conserved water, an important issue for delta farmers. The software was a significant improvement to PHAUCET, a similar but free government program already in limited use in the delta. Company leadership was sure that the product would have a strong market, but sales were discouraging with fewer than 200,000 acres (less than three percent of the market) under Pipe Planner management after three years of development efforts. Company leaders must decide if Delta Plastics should continue to invest money and resources in Pipe Planner, and if so, how to market and encourage use of the Pipe Planner program software by farmers. In this case the students can study the initial failure of diffusion of a market innovation and analyze the factors that led to that failure in a particular social context-farmers in the delta region. The case is suitable for use in a class on communication, or product innovation and marketing, for upper level undergraduates or graduate students. Students use the diffusion of innovation analysis to propose and evaluate options for Delta Plastics regarding next steps in the marketing and promotion of Pipe Planner within its core market.

A maker of paints and product coatings is considering introducing a new high-performance, environmentally-friendly hardwood coating called Lena. To proceed with the next phase of development, Pintura's VP of new product development must present a convincing analysis of the product's feasibility-along with a proposed marketing program. The VP must consider the relationship of the proposed product to the rest of the Industrial Finishes Group's product line, as well as how it would contribute to corporate and divisional objectives. The Pintura case can be used in a variety of classes, including an introductory marketing course, a capstone course, or a business-to-business (B2B) marketing course. The primary focus is on product-policy decisions. The most likely use for the case is in a module on product-line planning. It also can be used as a case on marketing planning.