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Plank's $1 billion company probably started on a college football field, where his sweat-soaked T-shirts drove the future CEO crazy. After graduation he found a fabric that would wick away moisture and stay light, so he produced a bunch of prototypes. Beginning with an impressive network of former teammates who had gone on to the pros, Plank gradually spread the word about his product. Soon he was outfitting entire teams. But within a couple of years, star players were asking to be paid to wear Under Armour. That meant Plank had to make some tough decisions. Only a few athletes are instantly recognizable--could the right personality make up for that? Was a number-one draft pick worth millions of dollars before he'd even dribbled a ball in the NBA? What's more, star athletes have everybody in the world coming after them. Could Plank break through the crowd and demonstrate that his company was a good fit? He managed to win endorsements from Barry Bonds, Tom Brady, Brandon Jennings, and many others.

Marketers see today's consumers as web-savvy, mobile-enabled data sifters who pounce on whichever brand or store offers the best deal. In response, they've ramped up their interactions with customers. But for many consumers, the rising volume of marketing messages isn't empowering--it's overwhelming. Rather than pulling customers into the fold, marketers are pushing them away with relentless and ill-conceived efforts to engage. What do consumers want from marketers? Simplicity. After surveying thousands of consumers and interviewing hundreds of marketers and other executives, the authors find that the single biggest driver of customer "stickiness" is the ease with which consumers can gather information about a product and confidently and efficiently sort through their available choices. They offer three tactics marketers can use to simplify consumers' decision making and help them navigate the purchase journey. Companies should minimize the number of information sources consumers must touch as they move confidently toward a purchase. They should provide trustworthy sources of product information and recommendations. And they should offer tools that will help consumers weigh their options by identifying the product features that are most relevant to them. Companies that avoid bombarding customers and instead focus on simplifying consumers' decision making will rise above the din, and their customers will stick by them as a result.

The stream of customers who visit Flanagan Theme Parks has started to dwindle. The fictional Australian company must decide, with the help of consultant Allie James, whether to try to attract a whole new crop of customers using DailyDilly, a fast-growing social-coupon venture. Allie and Ruth Davison, Flanagan's marking director, take a lunchtime tour of the marketing landscape to answer a key question for any company that is considering such an initiative: "Are daily deal seekers the right kind of customers for our business?" Expert commentary comes from Gideon Lask, the founder of BuyaPowa, a UK-based social media business; and Al Bhakta, CEO of Genghis Grill, a Dallas-based restaurant chain. HBR's online readers also weigh in.

The stream of customers who visit Flanagan Theme Parks has started to dwindle. The fictional Australian company must decide, with the help of consultant Allie James, whether to try to attract a whole new crop of customers using DailyDilly, a fast-growing social-coupon venture. Allie and Ruth Davison, Flanagan's marking director, take a lunchtime tour of the marketing landscape to answer a key question for any company that is considering such an initiative: "Are daily deal seekers the right kind of customers for our business?" Expert commentary comes from Gideon Lask, the founder of BuyaPowa, a UK-based social media business; and Al Bhakta, CEO of Genghis Grill, a Dallas-based restaurant chain. HBR's online readers also weigh in.

The stream of customers who visit Flanagan Theme Parks has started to dwindle. The fictional Australian company must decide, with the help of consultant Allie James, whether to try to attract a whole new crop of customers using DailyDilly, a fast-growing social-coupon venture. Allie and Ruth Davison, Flanagan's marking director, take a lunchtime tour of the marketing landscape to answer a key question for any company that is considering such an initiative: "Are daily deal seekers the right kind of customers for our business?" Expert commentary comes from Gideon Lask, the founder of BuyaPowa, a UK-based social media business; and Al Bhakta, CEO of Genghis Grill, a Dallas-based restaurant chain. HBR's online readers also weigh in.

Unhaggle is a business model that uses a website to link up consumers with automobile dealers. The consumer describes the sort of vehicle they are looking for and the dealers compete to serve the consumer at the lowest possible price. The case illustrates how power in a negotiation comes from supply and demand. By bringing dealers to the consumer, Unhaggle helps drive down the cost of the vehicle to the consumer while reducing the dealer's marketing costs. The case thus illustrates how technology changes a business, and specifically what players hold the power in a market. This case can also be used to illustrate a multi-player prisoner's dilemma (game theory). Doing so involves arguing that dealers collectively would be better off if they refused to join Unhaggle's dealer network (all would gain higher margins), but any individual dealer has an incentive to defect and join, in order to gain access to Unhaggle's consumers.

Unhaggle is a business model that uses a website to link up consumers with automobile dealers. The consumer describes the sort of vehicle they are looking for and the dealers compete to serve the consumer at the lowest possible price. The case illustrates how power in a negotiation comes from supply and demand. By bringing dealers to the consumer, Unhaggle helps drive down the cost of the vehicle to the consumer while reducing the dealer’s marketing costs. The case thus illustrates how technology changes a business, and specifically what players hold the power in a market. This case can also be used to illustrate a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma (game theory). Doing so involves arguing that dealers collectively would be better off if they refused to join Unhaggle’s dealer network (all would gain higher margins), but any individual dealer has an incentive to defect and join, in order to gain access to Unhaggle’s consumers.

This case features Bel-Brand's efforts to position its flagship brand The Laughing Cow in the United States. The challenges in this case are twofold. First, choose a viable position for a brand after a period of high growth following the South Beach Craze. The difficulty here is that the initial driver of the brand's position, the South Beach Craze, an environmental factor, is dwindling and is not sustainable. Second, the brand was receiving pressure from global stakeholders to try to unify the positioning in the United States with the global brand positioning. These are both challenges that were faced by the marketing team and raised in the case.

In 2009, when the Indian cement market was strong, major Indian players were preparing to move from a regional emphasis to pan-India penetration. To become a national player, Jaiprakash Associates Limited grew through acquisitions and setting up new plants. To strengthen its position, the company decided to move from a multiple-brand cement portfolio to a single-brand entity. It merged its two existing brands of cement, Buniyad Jaypee Cement and Jaypee Buland Cement, into a new brand, Jaypee Cement. Expanding into new geographic markets and creating a pan-India presence for the brand was the motive for this merger. When global brands such as Swiss giant Holcim and France’s Lafarge continued with a multi-brand strategy in India, it was understandable that industry experts doubted whether Jaypee’s decision to move from multi-branding to mono-branding was correct.

The case describes a critical external incident which will have fundamental consequences for a small but very successful family business. At the beginning of 2010, Konnopke's Imbiss was considered to be one of the, if not the most famous snack bars in Berlin. This family-owned business was especially famous for the legendary "Currywurst", a Berlin invention that consists of a sausage fried in hot oil and served with ketchup, chili sauce, curry-powder and French fries. The Konnopke Imbiss main branch was located in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, which was considered to be one of the "coolest" districts of Berlin. Konnopke's had become a Berlin fast food icon, winning critical acclaim in almost all major Berlin travel guides. But at the same time, the snack bar did not any longer seem to fit to its environment which had changed from a working class district, to a posh neighborhood mainly consisting of young freelancers and tourists.

Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion (RIM), faced a situation of truly disastrous proportions. Earlier that week, service outages had started occurring on RIM’s popular BlackBerry smartphone devices, affecting over 30 million BlackBerry users globally. For a total of three days, RIM engineers worked around the clock to fix the widespread technical problems. However, with the company providing only brief comments to the public, many consumers and industry officials became increasingly frustrated. With the worldwide release of the new Apple iPhone 4S just days away, Lazaridis was presented with the additional challenge of how and if RIM should respond publicly to help restore consumer and market confidence.

This case is a supplement to Research in Motion: Blackberry Blackout (A).

On the morning of September 19, 2011, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the online movie provider Netflix Incorporated became witness to growing public discontent and media criticism directed at the company. The previous evening, the CEO had announced on the company blog that Netflix would be splitting into two separate entities. With the proposed change, the Netflix DVD-by-mail service would be spun out and renamed Qwikster. The move would leave the Netflix brand to focus on offering online streamed entertainment. This was not the first time Netflix had caused large-scale consumer frustration, as a few months earlier in July 2011 the company had announced it would be increasing rates by as much as 60 per cent. The result was a loss of over one million Netflix subscribers by September 2011, representing the first time the company had ever lost subscribers from one quarter to the next. Although the split into two separate entities could be seen as a good business strategy, Netflix did not follow through with a well-developed communication plan. Moving forward, both Netflix and Qwikster had come to represent an unfortunate dichotomy, and Netflix’s management was in desperate need to develop better communications with disgruntled consumers or risk losing additional subscribers and lucrative profits to a number of growing competitors.

In April 2011, Vithal Gambhir, the marketing director of Vibhava Chemicals, an entrepreneurial venture and leader in the black phenyl category in the home cleaning agents (HCA) market in South India, was faced with a marketing challenge. A slew of multi-national corporation (MNC) brands in the emerging new category of specialty cleaning agents had eroded Vibhava’s share of the traditional black phenyl category by 50 per cent over the previous eight years. The marketing efforts of the MNCs had also led to a gradual transformation of the HCA market, expanding and segmenting it in terms of applications (e.g. floor-cleaning agents and toilet-cleaning agents) and benefits (e.g. disinfecting, cleaning, and deodorizing). As a result, Vibhava’s leading brand, “Black Belt” black phenyl disinfectant, had begun losing ground in the market. Vibhava had successfully responded to this decline by launching Ozone, a pine-oil-based floor cleaner, in 2003. Positioned as an herbal, eco-friendly, deodorizing floor cleaner, Ozone had managed to avert Domex, the leading MNC brand of disinfecting floor cleaner. However, during the last couple of years Domex had been available in many variants serving many segments and the market had become flooded with both MNC and established Indian brands. While the sale of Ozone rose in absolute terms, Vibhava’s share in the growing home cleaning market dropped from 25 per cent in a predominantly traditional product market in the 1990s, to 11 per cent in the transformed market of 2010. Gambhir now faced the daunting challenge of meeting an ambitious sales target of INR 1 billion for 2011-2012, which was double the sales of the previous year.

Vegemite is an iconic Australian breakfast spread and is often seen as a quintessential Australian product. This case focuses on Kraft's decision to revitalize brand performance through the introduction of a brand extension. Drawing on extensive social media analysis of brand image, the brand team led by Simon Talbot identified a gap in the market for a line extension involving a blend of Vegemite and Kraft's other iconic brand, Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Following a high profile campaign involving a competition to name the new extension Talbot's team chose the name iSnack 2.0 for the new product. The case starts two days after the public unveiling of this name and subsequent nationwide backlash against it. Talbot needs to consider whether to continue with the brand name or change it in light of the public outcry.

Sociable Labs was conceived as a start-up business attempting to use friend recommendations to curate and recommend purchase opportunities on the internet. Much as his Facebook social events app helped friends discover events based on their friends' events, founder Nisan Gabbay wanted to show users what their friends were buying or "liking," in the hope that such knowledge would help guide their purchases and even enable merchants to use Facebook to help grow their sales. How would he discover what his customers needed and what they were willing to pay for?

Sociable Labs was conceived as a start-up business attempting to use friend recommendations to curate and recommend purchase opportunities on the internet. Much as his Facebook social events app helped friends discover events based on their friends' events, founder Nisan Gabbay wanted to show users what their friends were buying or "liking," in the hope that such knowledge would help guide their purchases and even enable merchants to use Facebook to help grow their sales. How would he discover what his customers needed and what they were willing to pay for?

The director of new business development and strategy at Redmas Digital, an enterprising start-up, needs to write two sales e-mail templates for Redmas’s newest pet project, YouPostIt! One of the e-mails is for leads that the company has not done business with before (cold leads) and the other is for leads that the company has done business with before (warm leads). The director has to write concise e-mails with high “skim value.” He must distill a large amount of information regarding the company value proposition and company history in an engaging way. <br><br>YouPostIt! is an experimental marketing company owned by Redmas Digital. The concept is simple: consumers get a chance to send physical postcards for free. Consumers log in at YouPostIt.com, upload a photo and write a short note, and then choose a border to go around the picture on the postcard (the border is a corporate logo). The business that occupies the border of the postcard assumes the cost of the postcard. Businesses have the opportunity to include coupons on the physical postcard and via an e-mail notification message after sending. How can the director write these sales e-mails to businesses he believes will want to pay for consumers’ postcards?

The director of new business development and strategy at Redmas Digital, an enterprising start-up, needs to write two sales e-mail templates for Redmas's newest pet project, YouPostIt! One of the e-mails is for leads that the company has not done business with before (cold leads) and the other is for leads that the company has done business with before (warm leads). The director has to write concise e-mails with high "skim value." He must distill a large amount of information regarding the company value proposition and company history in an engaging way. YouPostIt! is an experimental marketing company owned by Redmas Digital. The concept is simple: consumers get a chance to send physical postcards for free. Consumers log in at YouPostIt.com, upload a photo and write a short note, and then choose a border to go around the picture on the postcard (the border is a corporate logo). The business that occupies the border of the postcard assumes the cost of the postcard. Businesses have the opportunity to include coupons on the physical postcard and via an e-mail notification message after sending. How can the director write these sales e-mails to businesses he believes will want to pay for consumers' postcards?

In April 2011, Vithal Gambhir, the marketing director of Vibhava Chemicals (Vibhava), an entrepreneurial venture and leader in the black phenyl category in the home cleaning agents (HCA) market in South India, was faced with a marketing challenge. A slew of multi-national corporation (MNC) brands in the emerging new category of specialty cleaning agents had whittled down Vibhava's share of the traditional black phenyl category by 50 per cent over the previous eight years. The marketing efforts of the MNCs had also led to a gradual transformation of the HCA market, expanding and segmenting it in terms of applications (e.g. floor-cleaning agents and toilet-cleaning agents) and benefits (e.g. disinfecting, cleaning and deodorizing). As a result, Vibhava's leading brand, 'Black Belt' black phenyl disinfectant, began losing ground in the market. Vibhava had successfully responded to this decline by launching Ozone, a pine-oil-based floor cleaner, in 2003. Positioned as an herbal, eco-friendly, deodorizing floor cleaner, Ozone managed to keep out of the way of Domex, the leading MNC brand of disinfecting floor cleaner; however, during the last couple of years Domex had been available in many variants serving many segments and the market became flooded with both MNC and established Indian brands. While the sale of Ozone rose in absolute terms, Vibhava's share in the growing home cleaning market dropped from 25 per cent in a predominantly traditional product market in the 1990s, to 11 per cent in the transformed market of 2010. Gambhir now faced the daunting challenge of meeting an ambitious sales target of INR1 billion for 2011/12, which was double the sales of the previous year.