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In early May 2022, Collie Turner, founder of award-winning non-profit organization Heroic Gardens, was looking to obtain additional revenue streams in order to expand the organization's programming. The mission of Heroic Gardens was clear: help veterans experience the healing power of nature. The pivot to a new campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic was successful, and the number of organizations and veterans reaching out for services was increasing. Heroic Gardens was looking for funding and new ways to scale in order to grow its programs and hire employees to support that growth. As Turner was preparing for a financial and program review with her board-and knowing that the organization was 99 per cent volunteer run-the challenge was understanding and finding a way to increase funding in order to support Heroic Gardens and the veterans it serves.

In February 2022, the chief executive officer of Defeat Duchenne Canada was eager to scale up the operations of his charitable organization, from its local origins in London, Ontario to a national and impactful venture. The management team had to find the best way to develop awareness of Duchenne muscular dystrophy to secure much-needed funding for research and improve access to treatment for the rare disease. Despite facing multiple resource constraints, including a name and branding change from Jesse’s Journey to Defeat Duchenne Canada, the team had to focus its efforts on generating the greatest impact.

In 2022, Roblox had 58.8 million daily active users, including over half of all children and teens under the age of 16 in the United States. Roblox, a free-to-use "co-experience platform", allowed users to come together in immersive 3D experiences to socialize, work, play, learn, and purchase virtual and real goods. Brands saw Roblox as a major metaverse testing ground and experimented by offering a variety of branded items and experiences. In 2022, Roblox was grappling with how to maintain revenue growth and generate profits, considering two key decisions. First, how should Roblox expand its partnerships with brands, and should Roblox allow brands to offer immersive advertising within experiences? Roblox would have to tread carefully to not raise the ire of watchdog groups who were wary of advertising targeted at children. Second, should Roblox change its economic model which was free to publish, and adopt a "scarcity economy" whereby Roblox would allow creators to only publish items in limited quantities and charge an upfront fee for item creation, similar to a manufacturing fee? On one hand, scarcity could prevent excess supply from driving down prices, but culturally Roblox users and developers were accustomed to unlimited supply, low prices, and virtually no upfront fees.

Vikrant Kadian founded Cherrygrocer Pvt. Ltd. (Fresherry), an online app and delivery service for fruits and vegetables, in February 2021 in Gurgaon, India, and was joined in the venture by three friends. In January 2023, Kadian was still the majority shareholder. The venture promised its customers better prices, convenience, an alternative to physical inspection of the produce, and traceability. However, the company had no defined target market and insufficient capabilities to straddle two main market segments, and the bootstrapped venture was suffering from wastage and inefficient resource allocations and facing high operational losses. Kadian had to choose from among the options available: Should he target a specific market or continue to straddle two segments and invest in capabilities? If he decided to choose a target market, should he chase the premium or budget segment? Should he continue bootstrapping the firm or bring in an external investor to implement a marketing strategy? Realizing the importance of his entrepreneurial dream and the principle on which he started his venture, Kadian had to decide the way forward without losing time.

Since its beginning in 2021, Stitchwheel LLC (Stitchwheel), a needlepoint canvas painting service, had seen immediate success. From the company's inception, the co-founder of Stitchwheel had been assessing the advantages and disadvantages of an expansion strategy and wondered what barriers she might encounter. She was also assessing the viability to expand beyond painted needlepoint canvases to achieve substantial growth. Within a short time frame, the company had enjoyed strong brand recognition and offered a meaningful unique selling proposition, but there were still many questions about the company's next steps, including which growth strategy would be most suitable. Did the company have the necessary resources and skilled management team to adequately monitor and support growth? What marketing and operational issues was the company likely to encounter with expansion?

It was July 2022, and Isaac Morgado, one of the founders of MVMT Strength Inc., wanted to create a comprehensive marketing plan for the fall season. The gym had recently moved to a new location and Morgado wanted to continue growth through promotional campaigns.

Set in 2021, this case describes how Amazon and Walmart have been two of the most successful retailers in history and are responsible for changing the rules of the game in the retail industry in the US. Over the years, the two firms had perfected contrasting business models to enable their dominance on the respective offline and online retailing. Walmart's model of low prices and strategic partnerships with suppliers had redefined supply chain practices and lowered system costs through the adoption of information technology. Amazon's online model of convenience of shopping from anywhere, anytime comprised a high-quality user-friendly platform with a large product catalogue, and a widespread and reliable fulfilment infrastructure to deliver the orders quickly to the shopper. In recent years, the growing customer preference for omni-channel retailing, an integrated experience that seamlessly comprised digital and physical retail, had compelled the two companies to make substantive investments in developing capabilities and acquiring resources in what was hitherto the other's domain. This leads to several questions that engage students. With Walmart and Amazon racing to add online and offline retail respectively, would their distinctive business models morph to become similar to each other? Or should each focus on its core strength, while offering the other service (online for Walmart and offline for Amazon) as complementary? Were online and offline retail more suited to different customers and product categories? And did their respective future prospects truly justify the dramatic difference in market capitalisation between the two retailers?

In January 2021, Girish Hanchate, the vice-president of the industrial distribution segment at SKF India Ltd. (SFK India), located in the Indian city of Pune, was facing a difficult problem. He had to find a way to mitigate the ongoing drop in sales from key industrial customers in India resulting from COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, with many SKF India customers switching to lower-priced competitors. SKF India had been successfully delivering industry-leading, high-value products, services, and knowledge-engineered solutions to its customers for many years. The company was well respected for its outstanding product quality, performance, and unmatched customer-centric approach. However, Hanchate was wondering if he should rethink the company’s business strategy. The drop in customers meant a significant revenue loss for SKF India because the industrial division was a significant profit driver for the company.

The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative direct sales force model. Jesse Moore, the founder, wished to scale the company through organic growth as well as geographical expansion into Nigeria. The strategy called for decisions on product/service offerings and go-to-market options. On the product side the company had increasingly migrated to larger in-home connected electronic and electrical devices. It had to decide how much further to go. On the go-to-market side its innovative Direct Service Representative network was hard to create and manage, and it had to think if there were viable alternatives.

Machine learning has been used to create value in various ways across a broad swath of industries. In this case, students will explore uses for machine learning in the context of the launch of the Disney+ streaming service in November 2019. At the time of the case, Disney already operated two streaming platforms, Hulu and ESPN+. Its new streaming service would launch with an archive of roughly 7,500 TV episodes and 500 films, including wildly popular titles from Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar. Yet Disney+ would be entering an increasingly competitive industry dominated by Netflix. Since its pivot from mail-order video to streaming in the early 2000s, Netflix had extensively used machine-learning algorithms to optimize customer experience and retention. In this case, students will assume the (fictitious) role of Margaret Gupta, a senior data scientist, as she ideates machine-learning use cases for Disney's management team. In addition to background information on Disney and Netflix, the case provides students with basic information on use cases and data sources for machine learning. The overarching goal is to give students a general understanding of how machine learning works, learn to recognize potential use cases from a managerial lens, the data required to fuel it, and the possible sources of bias that can arise from that data.

In February 2021, the responsible seafood program officer for World Wide Fund for Nature Singapore (WWF-Singapore) was looking to encourage a collective change in the consumption of sustainable seafood. Promoting sustainable seafood in Singapore, however, had not been easy. Due to cultural influences and the nature of seafood trading, driving a change in the sourcing and consumption of seafood among stakeholders required significant effort and creativity. Identified stakeholders were generally either slow in acting or unresponsive. With each party pushing the responsibility to another, the challenge facing the program officer and WWF-Singapore’s market transformation team was how to overcome this deadlock of inertia. WWF-Singapore believed that it was necessary to understand and address each stakeholder separately, as stakeholders required specific communication messages and support to help them make a change. However, with limited resources, WWF-Singapore had to be strategic in deciding who to target and how.

In February 2021, the responsible seafood program officer for World Wide Fund for Nature Singapore (WWF-Singapore) was looking to encourage a collective change in the consumption of sustainable seafood. Promoting sustainable seafood in Singapore, however, had not been easy. Due to cultural influences and the nature of seafood trading, driving a change in the sourcing and consumption of seafood among stakeholders required significant effort and creativity. Identified stakeholders were generally either slow in acting or unresponsive. With each party pushing the responsibility to another, the challenge facing the program officer and WWF-Singapore's market transformation team was how to overcome this deadlock of inertia. WWF-Singapore believed that it was necessary to understand and address each stakeholder separately, as stakeholders required specific communication messages and support to help them make a change. However, with limited resources, WWF-Singapore had to be strategic in deciding who to target and how.

In March 2020, when Swiss citizens were subjected to semi-confinement measures to protect them from the rapid spread of COVID-19, Oliver Price, a young entrepreneur in the canton of Fribourg, decided to launch a web platform to support local businesses that had been forced to close. The goal of this platform, originally called Support for Fribourg Merchants, was to serve as an intermediary between those businesses and consumers wishing to help them by purchasing vouchers that could be redeemed when normal life resumed. This solidarity-based initiative was a resounding success, and when the semi-confinement mandated by the Swiss government came to an end, the platform professionalized and continued to innovate. But could a spontaneous act of solidarity be transformed into a sustainable local business?

Two women entrepreneurs co-founded a profitable direct-to-consumer apparel brand called Suta. In June 2021, as the business owners were planning to increase advertising expenditure and scale up operations, they were confronted with a declining return on advertising spend on social commerce and other digital platforms. The co-founders needed to make use of marketing analytics to examine the effectiveness of their online store in converting visitors into customers and decide whether adopting a conversion rate optimization strategy could help improve performance.

Planet Milk produced and distributed A2 milk in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of the state of Orissa, in India. Despite the best efforts of its founder, Planet Milk had remained unprofitable since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020. In January 2022, the founder considered three broad alternatives to revive his milk business. The first was to change the milk’s packaging from glass bottles to Tetra Pak cartons. This change in packaging would increase the milk’s shelf life, allow wider customer reach, and improve revenues. The second alternative was to introduce an online order management option for consumers, which would increase the visibility of demand and thereby increase the operational efficiency of the business, reduce wastage and logistics costs, and increase profits. However, these options also required significant capital investments that would potentially not be recouped if the desired increase in sales did not occur. The third option was to target institutional buyers or retail channel partners, which would potentially increase sales but also decrease margins and increase credit. The founder had three months to implement a revival plan; if it proved unsuccessful, he could sell the business.

Student spreadsheet to accompany Ivey product no. W28030.

The case opens with the current crisis for Amazon because of its alleged use of sensitive and confidential business information from third-party sellers on its platform to develop competing products under Amazon's private label (PL) brands, a practice at odds with the company's stated policy. Such allegations not only hurt Amazon's reputation as one of the largest e-tailers but also brought to light a larger debate about the right way to launch PL brands. Although Amazon claims to have prohibited its employees from using nonpublic, seller-specific data, it agrees to have used aggregate customer data like other brick-and-mortar stores to improve customer experience. However, the third- party sellers feel that Amazon's unfair practice of using their private information has hurt them, decreasing their return on investment and compromising their product innovations. Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon's international consumer business, faces the following dilemma: Should Amazon continue its PL brands? Because PL brands are important for Amazon's business, Grandinetti must find ways to build synergy with third-party retailers while developing Amazon's PL brands. Grandinetti needs to address these concerns in the next shareholder's meeting.

From modest beginnings in 2018, selling to a few enthusiasts from her apartment, Madame Berrima quickly built Layla's Delicacies, an exotic Tunisian pastries company, into a thriving mail order business. Her sweets were handmade, customers posted rave reviews, and the New York Times attested to the product line's authenticity. The company invested heavily in product design, packaging, and branding and rode a wave of popularity of artisanal foods, which were enjoying brisk growth in the US. But by 2020, Layla's had fallen short of its goals.

In 2022, Runhua Group was a well-known automobile dealer in China with a large market share in the traditional fuel vehicle market. The recent surge of new energy (i.e., plug-in electric) vehicles was having a strong impact on the company's main business. The high number of new automobile companies entering this promising market was threatening the dealership model, the traditional sales and distribution channel that dominated the market. Runhua Group had always held a long-term vision and a cautious attitude. However, it had to make a decision on how to respond to the subversive changes in the automotive industry in a timely manner. What should be the company's strategy for the new energy vehicle business? How should it select which new energy brands to partner with?

In late 2020, Lynn Wilson, a social entrepreneur and chief executive officer of SparqU, Inc., gave himself one year to turn his company around. SparqU, which offered digital literacy training to underserved and underrepresented communities, had been funded by a workforce grant. But when the grant expired, Wilson left his academic teaching position to focus full-time on SparqU and fulfill his passion for helping Colorado’s people of colour, low income, and underserved to become digitally literate and improve their job opportunities. Wilson was all in. But he wondered, would his current promotional strategy targeted towards those needing to build digital literacy skills eventually be profitable ? Or should he consider other segments?