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Founded in 1941, Cervecería Polar had kept its position as absolute market leader in beer production and distribution in Venezuela with its traditional Pilsen for over sixty years. In 1997, it introduced its Polar Light beer, which was well received on the market. However, in November 2001, Cervecería Regional launched its new Light beer, which soon became a challenge to the market leader. This new product met consumers´ expectations: a light, soft beer packaged in a transparent glass bottle that helped reinforce its attributes. A few months after its launching, it had already achieved 25% market share in the light category. To respond to the threat posed by Regional Light, Polar management awaited its new Chief Marketing Officer for the Beer and Malt Strategic Unit, Cesar Menendez, to recommend future actions aimed at maintaining the company´s leadership position. What action plan would you recommend at the strategic planning meeting?

Raju Omlet is a restaurant in Dubai that is famous for making egg preparations that appeal to the Indian expatriate population. A father and his son jointly manage the venture, and they are both very happy with the way the business has shaped up in the last two years. An expansion is inevitable, but how should it be carried out? The partners are also exploring the option of offering home delivery service. A meeting has been called to try to find answers to two questions: Would it be possible to sustain the expansion with a single product offering, and would diversifying the product range kill the restaurant’s unique competitive advantage?

Unigrains is a French agribusiness-focused private equity firm that has provided specialized financing to France's agribusiness sector for decades and, as a result, cultivated a strong reputation and relationships in that space. Now that the broader investment community around the globe has become more interested in agribusiness, Unigrains faces growing competitive pressure. This case describes the general private equity model, provides an overview of agribusiness investing trends, and invites students to weigh the relative merits for Unigrains of expanding its reach globally versus maintaining its specialized position in French agribusiness.

All Nippon Airways (ANA) became the largest airline in Japan in 2013. Having been designated as a domestic carrier by the Japanese government till the mid-1980s and Japan being the sixth largest domestic airline market, two-thirds of ANA's passenger revenue came from the domestic market. However, the Japanese domestic population was decreasing at a significant rate; thus, the domestic market was expected to decrease. Also, plans of a super-high-speed rail and further improvement of current high-speed train systems would make air travel obsolete in many of the popular domestic routes. The key business problem that ANA faced was that amongst the changes in the Marketing 5Cs (Collaborator, Company, Competition, Context, Customer)-specifically, context (decreasing domestic population) and competition (high-speed trains)-how could ANA maintain/increase its business? As a way to resolve this problem, ANA's management was considering to invest in the international market to enhance its global presence. The case concentrates on specific challenges faced by ANA's management that must decide whether to focus on the international market and, if so, which international route it should pursue. Further, management must decide whether to purchase the Airbus's new super jumbo A-380 to increase operational efficiency and promote the ANA brand globally. The case provides details regarding the concept of product differentiation and the importance of aligning a firm's product policy with its overall marketing strategy.

Theranos Inc. (Theranos) was a medical diagnostics enterprise based in Palo Alto, California. Having developed an innovative blood-testing system for deployment in clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies, Theranos was keen on extending the use of its system to individual consumers in the United States and Mexico. In leveraging growth opportunities for its innovation in the burgeoning field of personalized medicine, the company's chief executive officer faced two managerial dilemmas: How should Theranos navigate the chasm between early adopters (the pharmaceutical companies) and mainstream consumers? And how should Theranos navigate the cost-benefit trade-off, as perceived by individual consumers, in a bid to promote product adoption in the mainstream market?

Theranos Inc. (Theranos) was a medical diagnostics enterprise based in Palo Alto, California. Having developed an innovative blood-testing system for deployment in clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies, Theranos was keen on extending the use of its system to individual consumers in the United States and Mexico. In leveraging growth opportunities for its innovation in the burgeoning field of personalized medicine, the company’s chief executive officer faced two managerial dilemmas: How should Theranos navigate the chasm between early adopters (the pharmaceutical companies) and mainstream consumers? And how should Theranos navigate the cost-benefit trade-off, as perceived by individual consumers, in a bid to promote product adoption in the mainstream market?

This case replaces UVA-M-0837. It can be used in a variety of marketing and strategy classes to understand how (1) at a macro level, a shift in consumer and environmental factors can impact firm strategy and (2) at a micro level, an e-mail-based marketing campaign designed to address these changes can impact firm-level performance. The case puts the students in the position of CEO Robert Huth as he is preparing for a board meeting. He had taken David's Bridal from a loss in 1996 to sales of over $1 billion by 2011, but he was concerned about future growth. People were waiting longer and longer to get married and, once they decided to, were spending much less than in the past, so the industry had seen year-over-year declines since 2007. How would David's Bridal establish its brand in the minds of a new generation of brides who shopped, purchased, and decided differently than had brides in past generations?

Lipman, the largest open field fresh tomato grower and marketer in the United States, has been successfully pursuing an aggressive strategy of acquisitions over the last several years. End market consolidation in the retail space has driven vertical integration in the extremely competitive fresh tomato business, where farm gate prices have not changed in 30 years. The company is facing pressure from climate change, alternative uses for farm land, and a transition to the next generation of family ownership of the business.

Around 6:00 p.m. on May 31, 2007, Urs Müller and Christoph Burger from ESMT European School of Management and Technology were getting prepared for the presentation. In about an hour they would present their proposal for an executive education program to the CEO of Energie aus Deutschland Systems (EAD Systems) and two of his senior HR managers. Sitting in the lobby of a hotel in western Germany next to the main entrance of the EAD Systems headquarters, Urs recalled the pitching process by scrolling through his notes. ESMT's pitch to EAD Systems" describes the efforts of ESMT European School of Management and Technology to acquire EAD Systems as a client for an executive education program. The case study comprises two parts, A and B, which allow comprehensively reviewing sales management in a professional services firm.

Stealth, or undercover, marketing involves the disguising of marketing communications that marketers undertake to purposefully influence their audiences without the audiences being aware of these activities. Inasmuch as stealth marketing involves secrecy (the withholding of information) and miscommunication (the communication of partial or misleading information), it is at least on some level duplicitous. Duplicity is the double act of secrecy and misrepresentation. In this article we explore duplicity in marketing communications. Specifically, we deconstruct the movie The Joneses to explore the various ways in which both marketers and consumers employ duplicity in their communications-to each other and themselves. We conclude by exploring the ethical and functional issues duplicity raises, and suggest that irony is one way in which duplicity can be ethically and productively employed.

In this article, we develop an understanding of native advertising, a growing new form of online advertising, which we define as desired marketing communications that appear in-stream. Current forms of native advertising can be considered in terms of their secrecy: how aware a consumer is of a native advertisement's source and intent. Based on existing research, we argue that less secretive native advertising will be more successful in the long run, and illustrate this using several cases. Finally, we detail important considerations for those marketers looking to capitalize on native advertising.

As surveillance technology advances and becomes more data rich and less intrusive and costly, brands collect vast quantities of customer data in order to gain customer insights to remain competitive. Brands conduct customer surveillance often without considering the consequences on customer relationships. Because of customer surveillance activities, customers may also experience privacy intrusions and turn to customer secrecy strategies that hide or disguise their data. To reduce this reaction, we propose a set of surveillance prompts to structure market intelligence databases to increase the efficiency of, and thus reduce the quantity of, customer surveillance activities while increasing data integrity and the potential value of customer insights. By discussing the need for brands to collect business and market intelligence, as well as detailing five types of customer data resources, we lay the groundwork for selecting potential customer data resources that best fit a brand's customer insight needs. We conclude with a discussion of two important considerations of a brand's customer surveillance strategy.

Everyone keeps secrets, and organizations are no exception. The current literature on secrecy in organizations is centered on the managerial perspective of secrets as competitive resources. In contrast, this conceptual article takes a consumer-centric approach and presents a detailed explanation of why and how marketing secrets create value for consumers. First, a discussion of agency highlights three consumer roles in the marketing of secrets: Insiders, who know the secret; Aspirants, who know of the secret; and Outsiders, who do not know of the secret. Second, based on two mechanisms of awareness and primacy, a value chain of secrecy is proposed that presents four types of value that consumers can extract from secrets: acquisition value, acknowledgment value, leverage value, and dissemination value. Lastly, secrecy is revisited as a strategic marketing tool for creating value for consumers.

Secret societies have intrigued humanity since earliest times. In this article we explore secret societies in the context of wine and how these institutions might be insightful in formulating marketing strategies. We contrast the characteristics of secret societies with those of existing secret wine societies such as The Wine Society and La Confrérie. Yet while some of these functions and characteristics transfer well, many 'secret' wine societies aren't actually that secret. Some of the characteristics of secret societies are also found in consumer brand communities. Armed with this knowledge, wine marketers can exploit the characteristics of secret societies to target market segments with precision and to gain the benefits of focused distribution opportunities.

Although the protection of secrets is often vital to the survival of organizations, at other times organizations can benefit by deliberately leaking secrets to outsiders. We explore how and why this is the case. We identify two dimensions of leaks: (1) whether the information in the leak is factual or concocted and (2) whether leaks are conducted overtly or covertly. Using these two dimensions, we identify four types of leaks: informing, dissembling, misdirecting, and provoking. We also provide a framework to help managers decide whether or not they should leak secrets.

Abstract: Ricoh Canada Inc., headquartered in Toronto, Canada, is a fully owned subsidiary of Japanese technology giant Ricoh Company, Ltd. The case's core problem stems from the fact that the perpetual success of a business model based on selling and maintaining digital print solutions is coming to an end. Ricoh Canada Inc. is at the front lines of a company trying to change its appearance. For so long Ricoh has been known as the "printer guys," however, within three years the market that Ricoh Canada Inc. has so long relied on is going to contract. With strong cash flow from its legacy business Ricoh Canada Inc. must decide where to invest to ensure returns for the future; services such as IT support and document management seem to be the obvious answer, but the question of how Ricoh Canada should grow in these new markets is not so obvious

Hundreds of thousands of would-be hoteliers have been popping up all around the world, hoping to rent their own homes and apartments to complete strangers through a service called Airbnb. The goal of Airbnb's aspiring hosts was to use the company's website to attract guests who were willing to pay the highest rates to stay in their homes for a short time. For Airbnb, the goal was to improve customer review performance so it could, in turn, increase profits. How could the company achieve its goal? Enter text mining, a technique that allowed businesses to scour Internet pages, decipher the meaning of groups of words, and assign the words a sentiment proxy through the use of a software package. In order for text mining to be useful for Airbnb, its marketing professionals first had to gain access to customer review data on the company's own website. The team then had to analyze the data to find ways to improve property performance. Was the team going to be able to leverage this large amount of data to determine a strategy going forward?

Raju Omlet is a restaurant in Dubai that is famous for making egg preparations that appeal to the Indian expatriate population. A father and his son jointly manage the venture, and they are both very happy with the way the business has shaped up in the last two years. An expansion is inevitable, but how should it be carried out? The partners are also exploring the option of offering home delivery service. A meeting has been called to try to find answers to two questions: Would it be possible to sustain the expansion with a single product offering, and would diversifying the product range kill the restaurant's unique competitive advantage?

In 2015, Burger King, one of America's oldest fast-food chains, continues to face fierce competition from McDonald's, Wendy's and the emerging fast-casual restaurant chains. As a result, Burger King needs to develop a marketing mix that will distance it from its competitors and narrow the gap with McDonald's, the industry leader. The marketing mix will also influence Burger King’s allocation of resources between domestic and international markets.