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Realizing the potential of Assam Mobile Theatre, which has emerged as the most popular entertainment media option in Assam, Q-Connect has developed a sponsorship business model which helps brands in reaching to rural customers in Assam. After establishing the business of Q-Connect in partnership with about forty theatre companies in Assam, its CEO - Dinesh Sibal is now looking to expand operations. He has to take decision about choosing an option of vertical or horizontal expansion. The case provides understanding about the way folk media options can be channelized by brands and important issues in implementation of event-based promotions.

This case illustrates the key issues and challenges in creating and sustaining a successful brand in emerging markets. Peter England, India's largest apparel brand by sales volume, is struggling to formulate a strategy to sustain the brand's market dominance. Indian consumer tastes are changing rapidly, making it difficult for any brand to stay relevant and fashionable over time. Meanwhile, other domestic brands and foreign players are expanding rapidly, aiming to dethrone Peter England as the market leader. To sustain the brand's dominance, the executive team has to dissect the forces shaping the market and develop a new positioning for the brand, a robust platform that can accommodate its broad portfolio of products and sub-brands. The executive team also has to develop an implementation plan for the brand positioning, entailing product development, advertising, promotions, pricing and distribution. Please visit the dedicated case website "http://cases.insead.edu/branding-in-india" to access supplementary material.

In 2015, Puma became the market leader in sportswear sales in India, leaving Adidas, Reebok, and Nike behind for the first time since Puma entered the market. Puma’s success in India was primarily attributed to its marketing techniques, judicious expansion, and customer acquisition strategy. Indian consumers had been embracing lifestyle changes associated with increased health concerns and the popularity of fitness programs. As a result, the sportswear segment grew, presenting an opportunity for companies to maximize their return on investments. While Puma moved ahead of Adidas to become the leading sportswear brand in India, the market evolved and became competitive. Puma needed to continue innovating its marketing strategies to hold onto its leadership position. Meanwhile, domestic footwear brands were expanding their retail footprints and distribution networks beyond their regional presence in order to gain a substantial market share. Could Puma strengthen its branding and hold its market position despite continuing competition from established brands and new competition from domestic companies?

Women of Worth (WOW) is an organization that seeks to empower women through training and workshops. The organization has also fought against discrimination based on the color of a person's skin through its "Dark is Beautiful" campaign-endorsed by well-known actor-director Nandita Das. However, despite the recent guidelines on advertising of skin-lightening products, many Indians still aspire to have fair skin. The sale of fairness creams continues to contribute to over 50% of the facial care market. Given this, what should WOW do to fight skin-color based discrimination?

Innovative marketers can now leverage augmented reality to craft immersive brand experiences, create more interactive advertising, and enable consumers to experience products and spaces in novel ways. Augmented reality (AR) is the practice of displaying digital information over people's real-time view of objects, people, or spaces in the physical world. While AR can play a valuable role in integrated marketing programs, little is known about the practice and how to execute effective AR programs in the marketplace. We address this gap by presenting a framework that describes the active and passive ingredients of augmented reality. We then describe the basic design decisions that marketers need to make when planning an augmented reality campaign. In addition, we explain how understanding and addressing the dynamics between various active and passive AR ingredients can help marketers to optimize their AR campaigns and enhance various types of consumer engagement: user-brand engagement, user-user engagement, and user-bystander engagement. Through our framework and analysis, we develop eight actionable recommendations--described with the acronym ENTANGLE--marketing managers can use to design immersive AR experiences that maximize consumer engagement.

The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has become a prominent management theory that firms can use to analyze resources as potential sources of competitive advantage. Theorists have suggested sponsorship of sport properties as one such resource, yet specific cases of sponsorship's role in a firm's achievement of a sustained advantage over competitors have yet to be explored. This article illuminates the case of Visa's longstanding global sponsorship of the Olympic Games, which was initiated and leveraged to counteract competitor American Express' advantage with global business travelers. Evidence is presented that supports Visa's achievement of a competitive advantage during the term of the sponsorship. The case is then used to develop a conceptual model based on the RBV to identify the key characteristics of sponsored properties capable of assisting the sponsoring firm in achieving a sustained competitive advantage. From a managerial perspective, the model is designed to assist marketing managers tasked with the identification and evaluation of potential sponsorship properties.

Social media networks have become essential to the modern business world and are especially vital for sports firms and athletes. Social media networks are new channels for firms to connect with their audience and establish a social customer relationship. For sports firms, athletes play a special role, as they are the firms' ambassadors and the focus of virtual communities of fans. For most athletes, social media is a powerful tool to take advantage of their time in the spotlight. However, social media has much more potential. This work analyzes the social media profile and content created by six well-known sports figures--Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant--to develop a model (STAR) for social media use. The adoption of this model can enhance fan engagement online and therefore increase athletes' and firms' brand value and connectivity with consumers.

Sports performance is not the unique ingredient of a sports star's market value. Some gifted players are undermined by weak media exposure while some less talented players who actively engage in social media and attract fans in millions benefit from exorbitant contracts. This research conceptualizes the effect of social media in the sports business and analyzes the recipes that lead to high market value for sports stars. This study uses qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) on a sample of 95 top soccer players in Europe. The empirical results reveal that sports performance and social media activity are both necessary but insufficient conditions for a high market value condition. This research provides a roadmap for managers and sports stars to navigate in the social media arena.

College students are inseparable from their smartphones, and heavily engaged in Snapchat. This social media app allows low-consequence expression: messages disappear within 10 seconds to 24 hours of their receipt, depending on the content. Because college students seem strongly attracted to Snapchat, the implications for brand managers interested in reaching this target market deserve exploration. Four focus groups of self-described heavy users show that this media app allows college students to enter the virtual Snapchatverse and find a sweet spot of acquaintances. The sweet spot is associated with feelings of relatability, inclusion, and effortlessness and has the potential to produce empowering experiences. The verbal protocols of college students suggest that Snapchat is an ideal social media for developing acquaintance brands: brands that aim to make themselves part of an inclusive, feel-good experience or highly relatable acquaintances.

Ramesh is the founder of a startup 'Artistically Yours'. Ramesh wants the company to become a market place which brings together artists who can sketch a portrait and consumers who want to get a portrait sketched. Ramesh along with his friend Vijay has conducted an exploratory research and now wants to conduct a confirmatory research. The case discusses how they use the insights from the exploratory research to prepare a questionnaire for conducting a confirmatory research. The case can be used to discuss different exploratory research techniques, how to interpret the findings of exploratory research and questionnaire construction.

Supplement to case A00120. Ramesh is the founder of a startup 'Artistically Yours'. Ramesh wants the company to become a market place which brings together artists who can sketch a portrait and consumers who want to get a portrait sketched. Ramesh along with his friend Vijay has conducted an exploratory research and now wants to conduct a confirmatory research. The case discusses how they use the insights from the exploratory research to prepare a questionnaire for conducting a confirmatory research. The case can be used to discuss different exploratory research techniques, how to interpret the findings of exploratory research and questionnaire construction.

Airtel, the leading mobile operator in India was going to launch the "Airtel Zero" platform that would charge service providers and OTT providers on the internet for mobile data traffic but would allow end consumers free access to the web sites that were signed up for the platform. The case revolves around the questions of pricing these data services to the service providers in a market where the price to one set of customers (the end consumer) was not independent of the price to another set of customers (the OTT service providers) - typical of two sided markets. Issues of net neutrality and competition have been considered alongside.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 916038.

Chinese automobile manufacturer Geely Automotive (Geely) bought the manufacturer of the iconic London taxi cab from its bankrupt British parent company. The manufacturer’s sole product, the TX4, was a highly specialized taxi vehicle ideally suited for taxi work. It included many features for disabled passengers such as a power-operated wheelchair ramp and a wide rear passenger door. However, the vehicle cost more than twice as much as its competitors and demand was not enough for successful mass production. On the one hand, increasing awareness of disability rights in most developed nations suggested that Geely would have an opportunity to take the TX4 worldwide with an aggressive promotional campaign, and would benefit from cheap production costs in China. On the other hand, transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft seemed to be pushing the entire taxi industry towards extinction.

Advertising Experiments at RestaurantGrades is an exercise in which students are asked to analyze and make a recommendation on the basis of simulated experimental data. The setting is a hypothetical restaurant review company called RestaurantGrades (RG), which shows advertisements above the organic search results when someone searches on the page. RG is trying to understand whether the current advertising package it sells to restaurants is effective at driving traffic-and whether an alternative advertising package might be better. To do this, RG has run an experiment with two treatment groups and a control group-with random assignment done at the restaurant level. Restaurants in the control group are provided with no advertising; restaurants in the first treatment group are given RG's current advertising package, and restaurants in the second treatment group are given an alternative advertising package. Students are provided with the resulting data-which includes an indicator for which arm a business was in, as well as outcomes at the monthly level for each business-and asked to assess which advertising package is more effective. The exercise provides students with an opportunity for experiential learning around the use of experiments to guide business decisions.

For any service company that bills on a recurring basis, a key variable is the rate of churn: How many customers cancel? Firms with high churn spend a lot trying to replace defectors with new customers. New research by Georgia State University's V. Kumar shows that they might be better served by smart strategies aimed at getting the right former customers to come back. Working with data on more than 53,000 customers who left a telecom company, Kumar and his colleagues found that companies can benefit by answering four questions on the basis of customers' prior behavior and their reasons for leaving. How likely is a given customer to come back? How long will a reacquired customer stay, and how much will he or she spend? Which people should get which incentives to return? And which win-back strategy is the most profitable and will be best for the company overall? By targeting their offers accordingly, companies can significantly increase their win-back rates.

Social media was supposed to usher in a golden age of branding. But things didn't turn out that way. Marketers originally thought that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter would let them bypass mainstream media and connect directly with customers. Hoping to attract huge audiences to their brands, they spent billions producing their own creative content. But consumers never showed up. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What happened? The issue is, social media has transformed how culture works, in a way that weakens certain branding techniques. It has united once-isolated communities into influential "crowdcultures." Crowdcultures are very prolific cultural innovators. Their members produce their own content--so well that companies simply can't compete. Consider that people making videos in their living rooms top the charts on YouTube, which few companies have managed to crack. While they diminish the impact of branded content, crowdcultures grease the wheels for an alternative approach, "cultural branding." In it, a brand sets itself apart by promoting a new ideology that springs from the crowd. Chipotle did this successfully when it made two short films critiquing industrial food, tapping into a movement that began in the organic-farming subculture and blew up into a mainstream concern on social media. Other good examples come from personal care. Axe revived its brand by becoming an over-the-top cheerleader for the "lad" crowd that arose as a response to politically correct gender politics. Dove championed the other side of the divide, with campaigns that spoke to crowdculture concerns about unhealthy beauty standards for women. Brands succeed when they break through in culture, and crowdcultures are a great vehicle for doing that. But firms can't identify the critical opportunities by relying on traditional segmentation and trend reports.

In 2015, almost 60 years after being introduced to the market, the Barbie doll was one of the world's most iconic toys. However, both the industry landscape and consumer preferences were changing, and Barbie was yet again in the spotlight as consumers criticized the toy for providing a narrow and unrealistic vision of how women should look, how they should dress, and the careers they should pursue. Sales and public perception of the doll were both on the downswing. Was there a place for the Barbie doll in 2015, or was this the end of the line for the iconic doll? What could Mattel, the company behind Barbie, do to turn things around?