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In an age of digital distractions, mindfulness has become a billion-dollar industry that extends well beyond training to include products, services, and experiences. Attitudes on mindfulness vary from the cautious to the starry-eyed. However, one thing is certain: mindfulness is here and it is here to stay, as the conditions that gave rise to its popularity are only likely to intensify. Thus, it is incumbent upon managers to understand the phenomenon of mindfulness and this presents difficulties. The marketplace meaning of mindfulness has become so diffuse as to be almost meaningless, while the mainstream psychological definition is at best partial and at worst potentially myopic. In this installation of Marketing & Technology, we first explore the conditions that gave rise to the surge in interest in mindfulness. Second, by drawing on original source materials, we guide managers and marketing executives through the dimensions/types of mindfulness and integrate the various perspectives into two models. We conclude with an exploration of the opportunities and challenges that mindfulness poses to managers and marketing.

For industries with low switching costs, customer loyalty programs (LPs) have potential to drive differentiation and sustain a competitive advantage. However, incentives provided through LPs also have a potential to escalate into costly price wars. In this article, we discuss how to design successful customer loyalty reward programs that bring value to participants and that cannot be emulated by competitors easily. We focus on three distinct aspects of improvement: personalization, reward types, and additional services. Through personalization, companies can leverage the knowledge they already have on their customers to tailor offers that they find relevant and appealing. For the reward structure, we argue in favor of a certain degree of opacity. We also encourage loyalty programs to consider giveaways that are unique and difficult to imitate and to use all the information they have available to provide rewards that fit with each customers'idiosyncratic situation or preference. Finally, competitive LPs should look beyond offers and rewards. In addition to purchases, LPs can reward participants for other desirable behaviors; they can also provide additional services that impose minimal costs on firms, but bring value to customers.

When the mother-daughter founders of DivaCup set out with a mission to disrupt the menstrual care industry with an innovative product form, they initially struggled to gain legitimacy and convince retailers to carry their unique product. Now, fifteen years later, the product was available online and in more than 35,000 retail stores worldwide, and the company was struggling with omnichannel distribution challenges and frequent violations of their pricing policy due to intense competition among channel partners. International distribution and the prevalence of gray market sellers were causing large price dispersions across markets, which was harming the brand further. In October 2018, the entry of a formidable competitor, P&G (owner of menstrual care brands Tampax and Always), into the niche product segment causes the CEO and her team to consider the best plan to reposition and differentiate its product to broaden its appeal to users of other product forms, while maintaining its market leadership in the menstrual cup segment. This challenge is made more difficult due to prevalent miseducation about menstrual care and menstrual cups in particular.

In the summer of 2016, the unprecedented growth of Pokémon GO introduced augmented reality into mainstream gaming. Pokémon GO was developed by San Francisco-based Niantic, Inc. (Niantic), a highly successful spinoff from Google Inc., which partnered with the Japanese video game company Nintendo Co., Ltd. to bring the popular video game franchise into the mobile gaming sphere. Niantic's version included the innovative use of augmented reality, a technology that merged artificial reality with the real world. Although this strategy was a fresh approach, it also presented risks. Niantic was determined to shut down cheating apps and websites that were overloading the company's servers and giving some players unfair advantages. Some players were dismayed by Niantic's actions and by the apps and websites themselves, while others predicted that the game's popularity would disappear as quickly as it had grown. By late 2016, Niantic needed to decide how to move forward. Should Pokémon GO continue to evolve as an augmented-reality game, with teams and live events, or should Niantic create a new gaming experience focused on features from the original Pokémon games? Alternatively, should the company partner with third-party developers, including those that had developed popular cheating apps and websites? Finally, how should Niantic fund its unexpected growth?

Zydus Wellness Ltd. (Zydus), based in Ahmedabad, India, operated in the consumer goods sector, offering health and hygiene products and brands such as Sugar Free, Everyuth, Actilife, and Nutralite. Zydus promoted its Nutralite margarine brand mainly through television advertising. Its other communication strategies included digital marketing efforts and on-ground activities. Entering a market that was primarily dominated by Amul butter, Nutralite positioned itself in its marketing communications as a healthier alternative to butter. With Amul, Nutralite faced a strong legacy and brand loyalty, which Amul had created in the market over the years. Market research indicated that consumers were uncertain about what kind of product Nutralite was. At the end of 2017, the head of marketing at Zydus faced several challenging questions: How should the brand establish its identity? Having existed in the market for more than a decade, should Nutralite now promise something more than health? Finally, how could the company convert this transactional relationship with its consumers and strengthen its market share?

In May 2018, B9 Beverages Private Limited (B9 Beverages), the owner of craft beer Bira 91, reached a total of over US$100 million in funding after receiving $50 million from Sofina SA, a Belgian investment firm. This third round of funding would allow the company to meet the various objectives that the founder and chief executive officer had planned for the company's new Bira 91. He wanted his India business to break even by 2019 and expand fivefold over the next three years. He also wanted to establish a leadership position in the Indian premium beer market. The company also planned to launch Bira 91 as a public company through an initial public offering within the next few years. His long-term goal was to make Bira 91 a product rooted in India, as well as a global leader in craft beer. As the market and competition continued to grow, B9 Beverages had to develop a strategy to differentiate Bira 91 in the crowded global beer market.

In 2017, the German grocery chain Lidl Stiftung & Co. KG (Lidl) opened its first 20 U.S. stores in the southern states of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Key target segments of Lidl were budget-conscious customers, middle-class families with children, and elderly customers on a fixed income. Lidl offered lower prices than its competitors and quickly gained a strong advantage in the marketplace. Despite high early consumer demand, however, Lidl struggled to hit the correct target market for each of its different locations in terms of tastes and demographics. With plans for 100 U.S.-based locations by the summer of 2018, Lidl had set its sights high. What could Lidl do to meet its U.S. market goals and expand into the future?

Francesco Cavarero, chief information officer of Miroglio Fashion, Italy's third-largest retailer of women's apparel, was trying to bring analytical rigor to the company's forecasting and inventory management decisions. But fashion is inherently hard to predict. Can artificial intelligence and machine learning replace human intuition in this industry?

In March 2018, Snap Inc. (Snap), based in Venice, California, and commonly known as Snapchat for its application that allowed users to send photos that disappeared, was looking for ways to grow its user base in the competitive social media platform industry and to differentiate itself from the other major platforms. To do this, it was trying to position itself as a “camera” company and to become relevant to a larger target market: adults aged 25 and older, a demographic that seemed already well-served by current social media platform options.

OpenSky.tv was founded in 2016 with the objective of getting people back to watching video content on television. The founder wanted all video content to be accessible through an Internet connection on the viewer’s television. His company’s platform located and brought together programs and videos that were of interest to each viewer, so viewers could have their own personalized video channel. One full year after its launch, OpenSky.tv wanted to focus on the Cantonese market, and then concentrate on Mandarin and English audiences. The founder was wondering what his platform’s business model should be. How could he achieve his initial objective of creating a business-to-consumer (B2C) recommendation platform?

In 2016, the promoters of Savourites Hospitality Private Limited, which owned the fine-dining restaurant 6 Ballygunge Place, in Kolkata, were visiting London to explore possible future growth plans. Their foray into the market of Bengali cuisine through 6 Ballygunge Place had been successful and had developed into a strong destination brand. With a view to growing, Savourites' promoters had ventured into newer product offerings and had tried moving into new geographical markets. In order to expand the brand's range, they had launched a pan-Asian restaurant; launched the Bengal Lounge, which revived the Bengali penchant for never-ending chat sessions; and started fixed-menu outlets as variants of their core offering, hoping to tap into the middle-class market. They had also moved into other locations within Kolkata and to other cities. Their various expansions and diversifications had gone well, and the team found that the bulk of the growing consumer base was the Bengali customers that they had hoped to attract. They wondered how to keep the growth momentum going while still appealing to this clientele.

How do our senses affect which products we like and don't like? How can products be made more sensorially engaging? What should managers consider when devising sensory marketing strategies? As companies are becoming more aware of consumers' subconscious responses to products and services, they are relying less on traditional advertising and marketing and more on the products, themselves, to influence customers by stimulating an emotional response. This conceptual note defines sensory marketing, its theoretical foundations, and how it can best be used to shape consumer perception and behavior. It explores how deliberate sensory inputs can impact customers on a subconscious level by triggering positive emotional responses to products and brands through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. The note also discusses advances in neuroscience and neuro-imaging techniques that have enabled more effective use of sensory marketing.

Janarthanan Balasubramanian, Division Head, Information Technology and online Communications at ISKCON wanted to understand the visitor feedback so that appropriate measures can be taken to improve the visitor experience at ISKCON. The primary problem at hand for Janarthanan was to reduce the existing manual effort for his team. Currently three resources are involved in collecting the reviews from social platforms and labeling each review into one of the four classes, viz. positive, negative, neutral and mixed. Two other resources convert the reviews from paper feedback forms/feedback registers placed at different points inside the temple, to an Excel file. The team begins its day by manually collecting, labeling and collating the reviews in an Excel file. At the end of the day, these labelled reviews would be stored in the database. At the end of the week, the total count of reviews for the four classes, viz. positive, negative, neutral and mixed was calculated to understand the overall sentiment. This was an extremely time-consuming manual process from data collection, that is, manually copy pasting the comments from social mediums to data collation and labeling. Janarthanan wanted his team to spend time and effort on analyzing the data and working on remedial actions. He wanted to understand the issues/topics that ISKCON should work on, rather than manually classify reviews and get the count of each review type. Janarthanan felt that getting only the split of positive/negative/neutral/mixed classes is not enough to draw inferences.

DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals. After a first year of trial rollout in Israel, CEO Lihi Segal and her team are devising a global go-to-market plan for the firm. The team is considering several target markets, ranging from people with diabetes to professional athletes, and distribution strategies including selling direct to consumers or through partnerships with healthcare professionals or insurance companies. Their choices are important because they will affect DayTwo's costs, pricing, positioning, distribution channels, marketing efforts, and product development.

Memaksa Steel, an Indonesian steel products manufacturer, has recently developed a new finishing process that reduces the wear time on steel by 60% for products that are subjected to intense abrasion during use. The marketing department believes this innovation should be applied to steel saw blades for use in Indonesia's lumber mills. Saw blades manufactured using this new finishing process would sell for 35% more than the older blades, but would drastically increase the cutting time before needing replacement. Santi der Majoido, the CEO, must examine the channel structure and decide whether or not to launch the new product.

The CEO of OLX Brazil, an online classifieds platform business, is debating among multiple paths to grow sustainably (i.e., profitably) without the need for investor money. The options under consideration are: (1) penetration growth by focusing on the core, (2) new markets growth by entering adjacencies, or (3) new products growth by developing new services. Each of these options caries a series of benefits and risks. How should OLX's CEO compare the options and choose the best path to grow his platform business?

Francesco Cavarero, chief information officer of Miroglio Fashion, Italy's third-largest retailer of women's apparel, was trying to bring analytical rigor to the company's forecasting and inventory management decisions. But fashion is inherently hard to predict. Can artificial intelligence and machine learning replace human intuition in this industry?

Francesco Cavarero, chief information officer of Miroglio Fashion, Italy's third-largest retailer of women's apparel, was trying to bring analytical rigor to the company's forecasting and inventory management decisions. But fashion is inherently hard to predict. Can artificial intelligence and machine learning replace human intuition in this industry?

Vertu Corporation Limited (Vertu), a manufacturer and retailer of luxury mobile phones, was founded as a subsidiary of Nokia in 2000. It was later acquired by a Swedish private equity firm in 2012, and then sold to Godin Holdings in 2015. Despite these multiple corporate ownership transitions, Vertu had remained uniquely positioned, differentiated by its phones' bejewelled embellishments and a worldwide concierge service available at the touch of a button. The luxury phones were sought after by ultra-high net worth individuals as instantly recognizable status symbols akin to luxury watches. However, in the early 2000s, the introduction of luxury-priced, full-featured iPhones; the decline of conspicuous consumption among ultra-high net worth individuals after the financial crisis; and the anticorruption movement in Asia rendered Vertu's business model unsustainable. Or was it? In July 2017, Vertu's new owner faced a critical decision upon the liquidation of Vertu. Should he sell or license the remaining brand assets to a luxury brand owner or retrench in China to focus on existing customers without taking into consideration the ethical and reputational implications to the brand in the rest of the world?