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On March 1, 2020, when news of the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, it meant an existential threat to the survival of businesses internationally. L’Abode Accommodations, a full-service property management company based in Sydney, Australia that specialized in mid- to high-end luxury vacation homes, was no exception. Virtually overnight, the company experienced an alarming number of contract cancellations. To make matters worse for an industry dependent on vacationers, Australia shut its borders to international travellers. How could L’Abode Accommodations adjust its operating model and strategic and tactical marketing efforts to stop the business from bleeding revenue and profit and to address the staff’s fears of layoffs, as cancellations poured in?

This is the student spreadsheet which accompanies product W26692.

On March 1, 2020, when news of the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, it meant an existential threat to the survival of businesses internationally. L'Abode Accommodations, a full-service property management company based in Sydney, Australia that specialized in mid- to high-end luxury vacation homes, was no exception. Virtually overnight, the company experienced an alarming number of contract cancellations. To make matters worse for an industry dependent on vacationers, Australia shut its borders to international travellers. How could L'Abode Accommodations adjust its operating model and strategic and tactical marketing efforts to stop the business from bleeding revenue and profit and to address the staff's fears of layoffs, as cancellations poured in?

Spreadsheet Supplement for Case W26692

Hong Kong Tramways (HKT), established in 1904, is the world's largest double-decker tram fleet in operation today. Having witnessed the development of Hong Kong for over 100 years, HKT is an icon of Hong Kong. This case describes how Hong Kong Tramways changed its brand image from just a heritage brand to a lifestyle brand, using its heritage as the brand's top attribute / value. HKT's revenue traditionally came from the tram ridership and advertisements. With the declining tram ridership, HKT decided to rejuvenate its brand to make it appealing to the younger generation. By doing that, they were also investing in their advertising business model, because more advertisers would be interested in using a younger, more engaging, and up-to-date advertising platform. HKT started a rebranding process in 2017 from a heritage brand and HK's icon of the greenest, most affordable, and most joyful transport mode to a lifestyle brand featured as "old age, young heart." Due to a restrictive budget, HKT decided to run the rebranding through a brand extension/brand collaboration strategy by carefully curating partner brands and looking for local brands that shared the same brand values and resonated with their target Hong Kong consumers. The rebranding has helped HKT to stay relevant for the younger generation, and yet is consistent with its brand history and business model.

During the early part of the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Hometown Foods, a large seller of flour-based products, thrived as consumers hoarded baked goods and took up baking to pass the time and find comfort. Then, amid growing shortages in commodities, a vaccine arrived, businesses began to re-open, and consumers benefited from federal relief aid. This perfect storm of high demand amid stock shortages generated the highest inflation in 13 years. Commodities accounting for a large percentage of its products, Hometown had to decide whether to increase prices, and if so by how much. Although the industry norm was to wait for the number #1 player in each product category to increase price first, with escalating ingredient costs significantly reducing Hometown's margin and profit, lack of action could result in serious financial distress. A decision to move first would entail several more decisions. Should Hometown price for cost or elasticity, employ component or blended pricing? Given pandemic-induced volatility, how should it prioritize quantitative pricing calculations relative to qualitative considerations? It would also need to anticipate reactions from competitors and stakeholders including its sales force, retailers, and consumers as well as investors and lenders.

Supplement to 522087.

In September of 2017, CavinKare Private Limited was faced with a tough decision about how to continue its growth in the personal care products industry. The company had been successful in the hair colour market in India, particularly in the southern regions of the country. CavinKare’s success was largely due to their focus on research and development and innovation. The hair colour market showed room for growth, and CavinKare wanted to make sure that they capitalized on its potential. There were three options before the company: stay with their existing products and markets, expand their existing products into new markets, or create innovative new products. To make the decision, CavinKare had to consider many factors, including consumer behaviour, new product development, marketing strategies, and trade partnerships. Only by considering all of these things together would the company have an answer to its question: what was the best option for growth?

Expenditure on product placement has grown faster (170%) than on advertising (15%) over the past 10 years, but some evidence suggests that the return on investment has been declining. For the well-known, fast-moving consumer goods/consumer-packaged goods (FMCG/CPG) food brands typically placed in local TV programmingd--the context of this article--the management problem of overfocusing on brand exposure hinders gaining brand choice, the ultimate strategic goal of marketing. Managers' preconditioning, ease of measuring, and assumptions about the value of exposure contribute to their subtle placements becoming blatant or in other problems, as when other promotional devices, like a television commercial or program sponsorships billboard, get bundled into the same TV episode as the company's own product placement. The higher brand exposure gained can evoke negative mental outcomes in consumers, weakening influences on brand choice. An experiment with a large sample of grocery shoppers supports such an outcome. More strategic value can also be gained from product placements in general by their use longitudinally, in-between campaigns of TV commercials, as an instructive tool and through normalizing a brand's role in a consumer's life. We provide eight checkpoints for marketers to consider when planning to use product placement to gain value for their brands.

In May 2021, Asahi Group Holdings, Limited (Asahi), a Japanese global beer, spirits, soft drinks, and food company, shifted its focus to non-alcoholic beers. The shift was made after spending US$20 billion to acquire premium beer brands from Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV, a Belgian multinational drinks and brewing company.<br><br>The Japanese beer market had been shrinking for decades with Japan’s declining population, and more recently, the market had shrunk further because of restrictions imposed during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In response, domestic beer producers were looking abroad for better market opportunities.<br><br>Asahi needed a strategy to compete against the Belgian beer giant. Considerations included whether to pursue growth in Asahi’s core beer business or diversify in the food industry, how to position a growing portfolio of products to minimize cannibalization, whether to shift focus from the premium to the lower-mass beer market, and how to approach the potential Chinese beer market. Regardless of growth strategy, Asahi needed to deal with a loss in share value, triggered by investors nervous about Asahi’s acquisition spree. To regain investor trust, Asahi needed to manage its financial leverage.

On is a Swiss SME founded in 2010 in Zurich, Switzerland, by three friends - Caspar Coppetti, David Allemann, and former pro athlete Olivier Bernhard. The startup invented an award-winning running shoe with an outsole that absorbs vertical and horizontal shocks, allowing for both a soft landing and an explosive take-off. Although On was launched as a premium brand for serious runners, it gained a dedicated following among nurses, casual walkers, and trendsetters. The business quickly expanded to the U.S. and Japan, the world's largest running shoe markets, growing from a startup with three founders to an international company that innovated constantly and brought new products to market. To support its growth, it had to recruit the right people, team up with the right partners, formulate the right strategy, and bring the right stakeholders and ambassadors on board. At the end of 2019, On had 500 employees, and its international headquarters and R&D were located in Zurich. In comparison, Nike had over 76,700 employees and Adidas some 57,000. By April 2021, On had increased its staff to 764 and aimed to have 1,000 employees by year-end. But how had this exponential growth affected On's corporate culture, and how could On stabilize its business model and ensure its sustainability in the face of intense competition?

In 2015, HiteVision Tech Co. Ltd., a leading Chinese enterprise in the research and development and manufacturing of interactive educational flat-panel displays (IFPDs), faced a developmental bottleneck. The general manager of the commercial product department turned his attention from the educational to the commercial IFPD market. In early 2018, during the process of entering the commercial IFPD market, the company encountered a series of channel conflicts, which were resolved by adopting a multibrand strategy. However, after achieving initial success in the commercial IFPD market, the company encountered new channel conflicts. In early 2019, the company was facing a distribution problem and an e-business channel issue. The general manager again needed to find a solution.

At 824 million, Pinduoduo had the most customers in global e-commerce as of March 2021. It had also expanded aggressively into grocery shopping with Duo Duo Grocery, riding on the demands that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, and set its sights on becoming the world's grocer. Despite its formidable progress, the e-commerce platform remained in the red, recording a loss of more than US$443 million in the first quarter of 2021. Its closest rivals, Alibaba and JD, remained hot on its heels, matching its forays into its stronghold of the lower-tier cities in the country. The year 2021 also marked a year of leadership renewal for Pinduoduo. Colin Zheng Huang, its founding CEO and Chairman, had passed the baton of leadership to Lei Chen, a fellow co-founder. Huang's decision to step aside was to focus on figuring out the future of Pinduoduo. He believed research on food and life sciences would remake agriculture in China. How should investors see these moves and achievements by Pinduoduo? Are farming and smart logistics its 'end game'?

In 2015, HiteVision Tech Co. Ltd., a leading Chinese enterprise in the research and development and manufacturing of interactive educational flat-panel displays (IFPDs), faced a developmental bottleneck. The general manager of the commercial product department turned his attention from the educational to the commercial IFPD market. In early 2018, during the process of entering the commercial IFPD market, the company encountered a series of channel conflicts, which were resolved by adopting a multibrand strategy. However, after achieving initial success in the commercial IFPD market, the company encountered new channel conflicts. In early 2019, the company was facing a distribution problem and an e-business channel issue. The general manager again needed to find a solution.

The Hatsu brand of tea beverages and healthy food products emerged from the idea of two Colombian entrepreneurs in 2010 and evolved, in just over five years, to capture the interest of the leading company in the Colombian beverage market, Postobón SA (Postobón), which acquired it. In this context, Hatsu faced the challenge of consolidating itself in the tea beverage market while also venturing into other product categories (e.g., cereal bars, nuts, infusions, and sodas) and multiplying its sales without losing the lifestyle concept on which it was built and through which it had succeeded. By late 2020, Postobón's premium business unit director needed to determine how Hatsu could be turned into a megabrand without losing its essence.

The Hatsu brand of tea beverages and healthy food products emerged from the idea of two Colombian entrepreneurs in 2010 and evolved, in just over five years, to capture the interest of the leading company in the Colombian beverage market, Postobón SA (Postobón), which acquired it. In this context, Hatsu faced the challenge of consolidating itself in the tea beverage market while also venturing into other product categories (e.g., cereal bars, nuts, infusions, and sodas) and multiplying its sales without losing the lifestyle concept on which it was built and through which it had succeeded. By late 2020, Postobón’s premium business unit director needed to determine how Hatsu could be turned into a megabrand without losing its essence.

TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, was launched in 2012 around a simple idea - helping users entertain themselves on their smartphones while on the Beijing Subway. In less than a decade, it had become one of the world's most valuable private companies, with investors confident that it could replicate a rapid ascent in China in country markets around the world. By May 2020, TikTok operated in 155 countries and, together with Douyin (its China app), it had engaged roughly a billion monthly active users, placing it in the top ranks of digital platforms globally. Some industry experts argued that it was the first consumer app operating at scale where artificial intelligence (or AI) was the product. TikTok had drawn the attention of competitors, regulators, and politicians, especially in the U.S., where commercial success was considered critical to ByteDance's long-term enterprise value. Both success and controversy raised a number of critical questions: What kind of platform was TikTok? How rapidly should TikTok's leadership attempt to validate and scale its monetization model outside of China? What effect would the COVID-19 pandemic have on TikTok's momentum and trajectory? Would TikTok become the first "Super App" with a global footprint? Or, if it moved too fast, did it run the risk of becoming "the next Vine" - a supernova that shone brightly only for a passing moment?