個案總覽

Sony has become one of the most successful innovators of technology. Recently, however, the company’s significant setbacks have led analysts and investors to question its long-term viability. Sony’s PlayStation 4 was launched in the North American market in 2013, to be followed by releases in the United Kingdom and Japan. After experiencing high sales and profits from the PlayStation 4’s two precursors, Sony anticipates the new release will also attract high sales. This case focuses on the idiosyncrasies of the gaming console industry and Sony’s strategy to ensure success for the launch of the PlayStation 4.

In 2013, Target Corporation, the fourth-largest retailer in the United States, launched its first international expansion by opening 125 stores in Canada. Senior executives expected that Target Canada stores would generate $1 billion in annual revenue. However, by late 2013, after losses of more than $900 million, it became obvious that the Canadian expansion had failed. As a result of the stores’ underperformance, Target has appointed a new president of Target Canada, who is challenged to turn the Canadian stores around. The new president must analyze the situation and decide on the best strategy to provide the highest return in the short term and the best strategic positioning for the long term.

In 2013, Target Corporation, the fourth-largest retailer in the United States, launched its first international expansion by opening 125 stores in Canada. Senior executives expected that Target Canada stores would generate $1 billion in annual revenue. However, by late 2013, after losses of more than $900 million, it became obvious that the Canadian expansion had failed. As a result of the stores' underperformance, Target has appointed a new president of Target Canada, who is challenged to turn the Canadian stores around. The new president must analyze the situation and decide on the best strategy to provide the highest return in the short term and the best strategic positioning for the long term.

Sony has become one of the most successful innovators of technology. Recently, however, the company's significant setbacks have led analysts and investors to question its long-term viability. Sony's PlayStation 4 was launched in the North American market in 2013, to be followed by releases in the United Kingdom and Japan. After experiencing high sales and profits from the PlayStation 4's two precursors, Sony anticipates the new release will also attract high sales. This case focuses on the idiosyncrasies of the gaming console industry and Sony's strategy to ensure success for the launch of the PlayStation 4.

In early 2004, SC Johnson's executives met to discuss the next steps for the company's Air Care (air fresheners) category in one of Central America's six countries. This category's development accounted for one of the company's strategic goals in that country. To meet their goal, SCJ executives believed they had to manage the category actively in points of sale (POS), especially at supermarkets. While this task proved hard as a result of local market characteristics, they remembered how, in late 2002, after two-year-long talks to invest and build this category at Supply, a major supermarket chain, they had managed to secure the approval of a category management and trade marketing plan intended to double Glade air fresheners' yearly consumer sales. This plan was executed in 2003, and, as a result, sales grew 80% as compared to 2002 revenues. SC Johnson executives agreed that this Supply project had yielded significant learning for the brand, contributing to category development and to building stronger ties with this retail chain. However, they did found it harder to agree on the path to follow next. Some thought company resources should go to consolidating the progress made at Supply, while others felt that building a new investment plan with Supply would undermine the company's flexibility to roll out its takeaways at other supermarket chains, which also presented significant opportunities for category development. As resources were limited, executives needed to make a decision.

Fabindia, India's iconic garments and home furnishings company, had come a long way from its humble beginnings as an export shop in 1960, selling handloom fabrics to overseas customers. In 1976, it had started domestic operations in India and over the next 38 years had become synonymous with quality handmade products procured from artisans all over India, with a social conscience. The business combined the twin objectives of making a profit and providing a sustainable livelihood for rural artisans. However, the winds of change were blowing. The next generation of consumers, part of a different economic environment and world order, were less tied to the Fabindia ethos and had widened their consumption habits. Given these changes, was it time to evolve? Should Fabindia broaden its positioning? If it remained niche, could it continue the phenomenal growth it had experienced? If Fabindia chose to broaden its positioning, what should that positioning be?

Jimmy Choo is a British luxury accessories brand, specializing in shoes, handbags, accessories, and fragrances. Founded in 1996 in London by couture shoe designer Jimmy Choo and Vogue accessories editor Tamara Mellon OBE, the brand enjoyed immediate success and rapidly acquired a sophisticated clientele. The brand's reputation as a celebrity favorite helped fuel its rapid international expansion and in the early 2010s Jimmy Choo had a store network encompassing 150+ stores in 30+ countries and was present in the most prestigious department and specialty stores worldwide, except for mainland China. Appointed as Chief Executive Officer in July 2012, Pierre Denis, an experienced executive from LVMH, developed a new vision for the brand and made the entry into the Chinese market one of his top priorities. The case describes how Jimmy Choo's leadership team analyzed the Chinese luxury market and designed an entry strategy into China. The case explores the challenges and opportunities for foreign luxury brands like Jimmy Choo to launch in China and contemplates different marketing mix possibilities.

This case looks at a new start-up company, d.light Design, as it was seeking to go to market in India with its solar-powered LED lamps in 2009. Sam Goldman, founder and chief customer officer of d.light, was in New Delhi, India; his business-school friend and co-founder Ned Tozun was in China, the site of the company's manufacturing plant. One of the key decisions Goldman and Tozun needed to make was whether d.light should focus on just one distribution channel in India, or multiple channels. The startup had limited capital, so it needed to get the distribution question right to generate revenue quickly. The case thus combines an entrepreneurial problem with an emerging-market, or bottom-of-the-pyramid, channel design challenge. This case does not focus on product design or manufacturing challenges but rather on questions of: The constraints d.light faced in creating an aligned distribution channel. These constraints can have legal, environmental, and/or managerial foundations; Demand-side misalignments in the channel structure that will occur if d.light chooses one or another of the considered channels in the case, namely, (a) the RE (rural entrepreneur) channel, (b) the village retailer channel, or (c) the centralized shops channel; What mix of channels―or what single channel―d.light should focus on in the Indian market; The financial return possible based on d.light's current cost structure and overhead expenditures in India.

Mauboussin is a French jewelry brand founded in 1827 in Paris. In the 1920's, the company earned a huge notoriety for capturing the aesthetic and emotional dimension of the Art Deco movement in its design and gained a world-wide reputation for innovation and expertise in the realm of colored stones. Known as the designer for royalty and Hollywood stars, Mauboussin was a legendary jeweler but became complacent and lost its clients. Taken over in 2001 by a new leadership team, Mauboussin engaged in a radically different strategy and abandoned its ultra-prestigious and exclusive positioning to embrace a more accessible and affordable approach. The brand experienced several years of phenomenal commercial success in France, Europe and Japan and in 2008, Mauboussin entered the US market, where the brand did not meet the expected success. It eventually closed its flagship store in NYC in 2014. Mauboussin's leadership is nonetheless eager to learn from this experience to re-launch successfully in the US.

The case describes a program that CVS Health recently implemented to improve medication adherence, an important problem from societal, public policy, and firm perspectives. A test of the program, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement, increased the proportion of adherent customers by 1.4 percentage points. Students are asked to quantify the system-wide economic benefit of this improvement and draw upon insights from behavioral science to examine approaches for boosting medication adherence.

The selling environment has undergone tremendous transformation over the past 2 decades. Perhaps the greatest change has centered on changes and advancements in technology. The latest dramatic change has been the rapidly increasing use of social media and other related technologies in the business-to-business realm. The sales world began the use of technology through the use of Web 1.0, which was primarily webpage oriented; now we see the world of social media as the paradigm of how firms should implement technology. Although there has been some recent emphasis on how marketing might implement social media into their strategies and how the individual salesperson might implement social media into his or her daily selling routine, no substantive discussion on how social media is affecting the role of the sales manager has appeared in the literature. This article systematically examines how social media is impacting the sales management function and, in fact, may be dramatically revolutionizing the position. To help the marketing and sales organization better understand the changing sales world, we present eight lessons that every sales manager needs to embrace.

In 2012 Kate Spade New York's executive management believed that KSNY's brand equity could be further leveraged to benefit from explosive growth in the global luxury accessories market. Tasked to provide input on how to achieve this goal, the marketing team considered both how to expand the demographics of their customer base and how to brand any new products designed to target these new customers. Based in part on the company's own market research and interviews with President and Chief Marketing Officer Mary Beech, this case asks students to consider the course of action that would allow KSNY to preserve its established brand identity while continuing to grow sales among its loyal customer base.

Stella McCartney launched her own fashion house under her name in a partnership with the luxury conglomerate Kering as a 50/50 joint venture in 2001. A lifelong vegetarian, Stella McCartney does not use any leather or fur in her collections, which include women's ready-to-wear, handbags, shoes, lingerie, eyewear, fragrance, and a kids line. Stella McCartney's achievement in fashion and social awareness has been recognized on many occasions, and her commitment to sustainability is present throughout all her collections and numerous environmental and charitable initiatives. As climate change is becoming a more pressing issue, companies are pressured to embrace a more sustainable approach to their business. With fashion and luxury industries progressively rising to this challenge, what does it mean for Stella McCartney's brand's ethos to be a responsible, honest, and modern company? Is it possible that Stella McCartney's environmentally friendly positioning will not be as differentiating as before as more fashion and luxury brands are becoming environmentally conscious and starting to develop sustainable initiatives? Similarly, how are Stella McCartney's partnerships to develop ethical fashion items impacting the brand's luxury positioning and appeal?

In July 2014, a Shanghai television station revealed that Shanghai Husi, a Chinese subsidiary of a reputable US-owned food supplier, was producing substandard meat products. McDonald's was one of its biggest fast food clients and had been sourcing from the supplier for more than two decades. After cutting tie with Shanghai Husi, McDonald's China and its branches in Hong Kong and Japan were forced to pull a number of products from the menu due to a severe shortage of meat and vegetable supplies. The impact of the scandal was clearly reflected in the poor performance of its sales and stock. The food scare dissipated the general belief that food produced by foreign brands was better than that from Chinese counterparts. With large foreign-owned suppliers in China no longer guaranteeing reliability, what could McDonald's China do to strengthen its supply-chain management? What lessons should it learn from the incident? Would it be better for McDonald's China to run its own food processing plants in China?

In February 2014, Burberry's chief executive officer Angela Ahrendts is preparing to hand the reins of the English luxury fashion company to chief creative officer Christopher Bailey. Under Ahrendts and Bailey's partnership, in place since 2006, Burberry's revenues have tripled to more than two billion English pounds, and operating profits have more than doubled. Ahrendts has led Burberry to become a brand that once again stands for luxury and that has a strong global and digital footprint. Yet the leadership change is met with skepticism. Is Burberry's current strategy also the right one for the future, and can Bailey continue Burberry's transformation?

This case concerns Yildiz Holding's acquisition of Godiva Chocolatier from its previous owner, Campbell Soup, and its strategy in preserving Godiva's "made in Belgium" brand position. Provenance Paradox, a problem faced by companies in emerging countries trying to establish their brands in developed markets, had not become a problem for Yildiz Holding. After patiently waiting five years and seeing the company not performing as desired, Murat Ãœlker, the chairman of Yildiz, decides to change the management structure and encourage rethinking brand positioning, channels, and communications in the U.S. market. How was the Godiva brand affected by the execution problems of previous management? Why did Godiva succeed in international markets while it declined in the U.S.? What were the implications of the change in marketing strategy to Godiva's brand image?

In 2014, Chiara Ferragni, a globe-trotting founder of the world's most popular fashion blog The Blonde Salad, and Riccardo Pozzoli, her co-founder and business partner, had to decide how to best monetize her blog as well as her shoe line called the "Chiara Ferragni Collection". A year earlier, Ferragni and Pozzoli had already made a decision to transform her blog into an online lifestyle magazine and to build its positioning as a high-end brand. It meant that The Blonde Salad envisaged to only cooperate with a limited number of luxury fashion advertisers, inevitably reducing the blog's revenues. Ferragni and Pozzoli considered changing the revenue-generating model by incorporating an online market place within The Blonde Salad, but which strategy and timeline would she need to achieve her aim? Should Ferragni's shoe line, a separate company with a different ownership structure, be merged with The Blonde Salad or was it desirable to keep the two apart?

Monte-Carlo Weddings, established by Frank Damgaard in 2005, is the most respectable and exclusive wedding planning business in the South of France. Frank has organized the largest, most expensive and luxurious weddings in Europe, serving celebrities, CEOs, and other high-net-worth individuals from around the world. After 10 years in operation, constantly innovating and pushing the bar higher, Frank is wondering what is next for him and his company. Could he further elevate a wedding experience and exceed his demanding clients' expectations? Is it possible or even desirable to grow his high-touch, fully customized service provider business? How can he leverage his brand, reputation, and success in the French Riviera to build a larger business and stronger brand? What should he do next? Is he ready for another change?

Buoyed by the success of K-pop music and K-drama television shows in Asian countries, Jay Lee, Chairman of the South Korean conglomerate CJ Group, believed that the time was ripe for taking Korean cultural content to the West. One initiative, carried out by the Group's Entertainment & Media (E&M) division, was a daylong fan convention, called 'KCON' , that was held in Irvine CA in October 2012 and which featured various Korean cultural elements, such as music, dance, film, and food. In the spring of 2013, Miky Lee, the Group's Vice Chairman, called a meeting with key executives to review the results of KCON 2012's and make a recommendation to the Chairman on whether to hold a similar event in 2013. As part of their deliberations, the executives were expected to consider where a potential 2013 convention should be held, which artists to invite, which target consumers to focus on, how to price tickets and how to attract more sponsors. With KCON 2012 having lost money, despite a robust turnout, it was far from clear whether to repeat the event and, if so, whether its scale should be expanded beyond 2012's $1.1 million budget. With CJ recently opening a chain of mid-market Korean food restaurants in the Los Angeles area called Bibigo, the meeting would also touch on the restaurant's U.S. growth plans and how they might be connected to KCON. More broadly, the executives had to wrestle with the question of whether Americans would ever really embrace Hallyu, the Korean Wave, beyond one-off success stories like PSY's "Gangnam Style". And even if they believed so, was KCON the right vehicle to make it happen, or was the event just a waste of the company's time and money?

In 2014, tobacco giant Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) had to confront the rapidly evolving global tobacco industry landscape. E-cigarettes, once considered a fad, were becoming increasingly popular. Facing uncharted territory, tobacco companies were uncertain about how to most successfully enter this market and how to do so rapidly.