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Viral Nation, a six-year-old company based in Ontario, was North America's leading influencer marketing company. In March 2020, as the global COVID-19 pandemic struck, the founders of the company were assessing their venture's future growth prospects. Having just received three competing acquisition offers for their company, they needed to make a decision: Should they accept any of the offers, and if so, which one? Or, should they instead continue to grow organically in an increasingly uncertain market environment?

Viral Nation, a six-year-old company based in Ontario, was North America's leading influencer marketing company. In March 2020, as the global COVID-19 pandemic struck, the founders of the company were assessing their venture's future growth prospects. Having just received three competing acquisition offers for their company, they needed to make a decision: Should they accept any of the offers, and if so, which one? Or, should they instead continue to grow organically in an increasingly uncertain market environment?

Schiit Audio was a manufacturer of audio equipment in the Los Angeles, California area. The company, which mainly sold its products directly to consumers, experienced consistent growth in the years leading up to 2015. However, in the summer of 2015, the company's founder had three major issues to resolve. First, he was devoting half of his time to a marketing agency he had founded earlier and was increasingly feeling that the arrangement was inadequate to provide the leadership his audio company needed. Second, some suppliers were causing inventory and out-of-stock issues that made it difficult to deliver products to customers on time. Finally, selling products on Amazon Marketplace expanded the company's reach to new customers, but came with drawbacks, including lower margins, high fees, and inventory management difficulties. The founder had to make some decisions for the business venture's path forward.

Eco Femme (EF) was a social enterprise founded in 2010. It developed re-usable cloth sanitary napkins and marketed towards those looking for sustainable products to manage their menstrual hygiene. The enterprise faced several challenges in reaching their target market of poor women in rural India. There was a taboo attached to menstruation and it was thus a difficult topic to discuss. Also, there were popular, commonly used, and easily available substitutes in the market, which were heavily marketed and distributed. EF had narrowed its options down to three broad distribution options-community groups, small convenience stores, and apparel retailers; the team needed to choose and develop a plan.

Eco Femme (EF) was a social enterprise founded in 2010. It developed re-usable cloth sanitary napkins and marketed towards those looking for sustainable products to manage their menstrual hygiene. The enterprise faced several challenges in reaching their target market of poor women in rural India. There was a taboo attached to menstruation and it was thus a difficult topic to discuss. Also, there were popular, commonly used, and easily available substitutes in the market, which were heavily marketed and distributed. EF had narrowed its options down to three broad distribution options—community groups, small convenience stores, and apparel retailers; the team needed to choose and develop a plan.

Schiit Audio was a manufacturer of audio equipment in the Los Angeles, California area. The company, which mainly sold its products directly to consumers, experienced consistent growth in the years leading up to 2015. However, in the summer of 2015, the company’s founder had three major issues to resolve. First, he was devoting half of his time to a marketing agency he had founded earlier and was increasingly feeling that the arrangement was inadequate to provide the leadership his audio company needed. Second, some suppliers were causing inventory and out-of-stock issues that made it difficult to deliver products to customers on time. Finally, selling products on Amazon Marketplace expanded the company’s reach to new customers, but came with drawbacks, including lower margins, high fees, and inventory management difficulties. The founder had to make some decisions for the business venture’s path forward.

This case presents the initial difficulties encountered by Teaology, an Italian skincare products manufacturer seeking to penetrate the Canadian market. Well known in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the brand was unknown in Canada. Aware of their lack of experience in this market and that North American culture differed greatly from Europe's, the owners launched a joint venture with a Montréal-based partner.

In 2020, the three cofounders of Holaluz, a newcomer to Spain's electricity retail market, are preparing to launch a new offering: installing and managing solar panels on households' roofs at no extra cost for the consumer, who would still benefit from the energy savings stemming from the panels' production. Holaluz would fund the installations via a special purpose vehicle and use the surplus energy to power neighboring Holaluz clients at lower costs. There were many challenges in the new venture, like how to market the offering and if investors would buy into the new business. And what if Holaluz went a step further, got rid of all its tariff offerings and disrupted the market with a monthly "unlimited" flat rate for electricity consumption like telecom operators did with mobile phones bills? Was the market ready?

In the spring of 2018, the marketing team at Nike Inc. (Nike), based in Oregon, was faced with a decision regarding whether to follow the suggestion of the company's long-standing advertising agency to sign Colin Kaepernick as the face of its upcoming "Just Do It" promotional campaign commemorating the 30-year anniversary of the slogan. Kaepernick was an NFL quarterback who had famously begun kneeling during the US national anthem in 2016 to protest social inequality and police brutality. At this juncture, the US political climate was extremely polarized, President Donald Trump had spoken out very negatively about Kaepernick's "take-a-knee" protest, and the campaign would mark the first time in Nike's history that the company adopted a clear political position in its promotional messaging. The company had to carefully weigh several issues, including the impact using Kaepernick would have on sales and on Nike's brand image. Should Nike partner with Kaepernick on its campaign or pick a less controversial spokesperson? What market segments would be affected, and how? What were the implications for company sales and brand image?

In the spring of 2018, the marketing team at Nike Inc. (Nike), based in Oregon, was faced with a decision regarding whether to follow the suggestion of the company’s long-standing advertising agency to sign Colin Kaepernick as the face of its upcoming “Just Do It” promotional campaign commemorating the 30-year anniversary of the slogan. Kaepernick was an NFL quarterback who had famously begun kneeling during the US national anthem in 2016 to protest social inequality and police brutality. At this juncture, the US political climate was extremely polarized, President Donald Trump had spoken out very negatively about Kaepernick’s “take-a-knee” protest, and the campaign would mark the first time in Nike’s history that the company adopted a clear political position in its promotional messaging. The company had to carefully weigh several issues, including the impact using Kaepernick would have on sales and on Nike’s brand image. Should Nike partner with Kaepernick on its campaign or pick a less controversial spokesperson? What market segments would be affected, and how? What were the implications for company sales and brand image?

This case is a continuation of "How Peloton Built the Foundation for Enduring Success (A)," CaseWorks case #210404A (CU274). Connected fitness company Peloton enjoyed triple-digit growth every year between FY 2014 and FY 2020, posted its first positive operating cash flow in FY 2020, and saw its market capitalization exceed $40 billion following its September 2019 IPO. Despite growing competition, founder and CEO John Foley believed Peloton's best days lay ahead. But was the company's business model robust and resilient enough to realize its founder's aspiration?

Consumers often innovate with brand-related intellectual property (IP) without permission. Although firms often respond by exercising their legal right to stop such activity, there are a variety of situations in which consumers' unauthorized use of brand-related IP can be desirable for a brand or in which enforcing IP rights can adversely affect a brand. This article illustrates situations in which managers may benefit from choosing to forgo exercising their IP rights. To assist managers, this article contributes a framework for understanding the managerial approaches to situations in which consumers use IP without permission.

GrocerMax, an online grocery retailer based in Gurugram, India, had grown steadily since its inception in 2015, managing to gain a foothold in the highly competitive online grocery market. GrocerMax had also succeeded in achieving higher average order values than many of its rivals. However, in mid-2016, the company faced a number of challenges. As a new entrant, its familiarity and brand awareness among consumers was likely much lower than that of the established competition. How could GrocerMax increase its reach? What promotional activities and marketing strategies could GrocerMax’s management team adopt to drive more traffic to GrocerMax’s website and increase sales while keeping costs under control?

The Indian jewellery market is highly fragmented and ruled over by local players. Many unethical practices exist in the jewellery market, like the undercaratage of gold, misrepresentation of quality, etc. Tanishq, part of the Tata Group, is known for maintaining high ethical standards and delivering value to its customers through fair and transparent practices. It has a 6% share in the Indian jewellery retail market. With the festive and wedding season approaching, Ameya Kamat, the Area Business Manager (ABM) at Tanishq in Ahmedabad, had to develop the right mix of pricing approaches to stay ahead of competitors. This case revolves around forming the appropriate strategy for pricing, discounts and salesforce management practices that will drive sales during the festive season for Kamat in Ahmedabad. The crux of the case is how Tanishq, the jewellery business arm of Titan Company Ltd., forms and implements a pricing strategy in a highly unorganised and competitive market at a time of the year when a substantial portion of the annual sales is expected to take place.

The case tells the story of Dell Technologies and its efforts to revitalize its value proposition and escape a commodity trap by acquiring EMC for $67 billion-the largest tech acquisition in history. It also shows the deeply intertwined connections between a company's business strategy and its go-to-market operations. Michael Dell founded Dell Inc. in 1984 to assemble PCs. The company quickly became the market share leader by the end of the century. By 2008 (before the recession), Dell had expanded into servers, networking and storage, as well as services. Still, the hardware market was beginning to commoditize, with the trend accelerating after the recession. EMC, founded in 1979, had a similar story. It became the dominant player in data storage through early 2000 only to find that new technologies and nimble competitors were putting its business under severe commodity pressure by the turn of the century. Thus in 2015, when Dell made a $67 billion acquisition of EMC, many knowledgeable IT industry observers found it hard to comprehend the logic of two commodity/hardware players coming together. By then, most enterprises, large and small, were eyeing digital transformation. Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud seemed to be serving their needs. Thus Michael Dell had to carefully construct a strategic position for the newly constituted Dell company in the rapidly evolving IT market space. In addition, Dell and EMC also had to decide how to merge their Go-to-Market operations to gain the synergies promised by the merger. Dell had over 365,000 customers and EMC nearly 430,000. Dell had 17,000 salespeople and EMC, 7,000. Each had over 10,000 channel partners. Adding a wrinkle to the merger was a third actor, VMware, an independently listed cloud software company, 80% owned by the new Dell Technologies entity. Integrating their software capability would be an exciting opportunity and a challenge.

Daily Table is a case about a grocery chain with two outposts in Boston neighborhoods Dorchester and Roxbury. Its mission is to provide healthy food at lower prices to people in lower-income neighborhoods. The case explores Daily Table's responsibility to its employees during the COVID-19 pandemic amid a series of changes to wages.

Set in April 2020, with the backdrop of the Covid 19 pandemic, the case talks about the opportunities for visual search in the online retail market segment and beyond. Visense is a visual search software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions provider with a pay-as-you-use, API based, market solution that focuses on the retail segment. Visenze had experienced a spike of about 30% in the usage of its solutions between January to April 2020. Predominantly, usage growth had extended across all item categories, with footwear, apparel and jewellery products being the top gainers. The presumed understanding from this trend was that with more time in hand for home browsing during the pandemic, consumers were exposed to more visual inspirations and objects of desire. This inclination had led them to explore ecommerce websites increasingly, paving a direct path to progressive sales conversions. Moreover, consumers had started to demand shorter purchase journeys, in the quest for a frictionless ecommerce experience. While Generation Y and Generation Z were the major users of ecommerce and visual search, older generations (Generation X and Baby Boomers) had also started to increasingly use online channels of shopping. Visual search was firmly in a sweet spot with the promise of collapsing the conversion process from image to purchase in a few seconds. Amidst such market conditions, Oliver Tan, co-founder of Visenze, wondered if his firm required a new market strategy to tap on the latest opportunities. Should Visenze continue to focus on the retail segment? Should it target older consumers in the retail segment? Will its technology need to be enhanced to target the new consumer segment?

Sweeping technological change has revolutionized marketing, while societal challenges have raised expectations about marketers' social performance. This has altered customer needs, accelerated the entry of new types of competitors, and generated novel opportunities for value creation. It has also transformed how the function must work, requiring that it become more agile, interdependent, and accountable for driving firm growth. The authors provide a framework to help leaders identify the organizational design and capabilities needed to build a competitive, next-generation marketing function. Their framework has been used to guide marketing transformations at companies across industries, including consumer packaged goods, transportation, financial services, and retail.

A national brewing and distilling company grapples with its most profitable brand's racist history. This fictional case study by Joseph C. Miller, Michael A. Stanko, and Mariam D. Diallo features expert commentary by Geoff Edwards and Jim Birch.

A national brewing and distilling company grapples with its most profitable brand's racist history. This fictional case study by Joseph C. Miller, Michael A. Stanko, and Mariam D. Diallo features expert commentary by Geoff Edwards and Jim Birch.