In February 2007, Diego Papalia, founder and owner of Ottawa Pianos, was getting ready to meet with his daughter, Carmen, to discuss the strategic future of the company. Five years prior, the father–daughter duo had started separate projects within the business. Diego had launched the digital music centre and Carmen had started a piano school, with a plan to reassess which might be the more lucrative endeavour in five years’ time. The DMC sold guitars, amplifiers, drum kits, and various other electronic musical equipment; however, there was a high turnover requirement as music technology was constantly evolving. Carmen’s piano school had grown to over a dozen instructors and 300 students. The downside was that it took up a lot of space— in this case, the entire basement that could otherwise be used for stock storage—and yielded low profit margins. Diego and Carmen had to decide which of the two projects to retain.
Wowing Coffee Beans Corporation Ltd. (Wowing Coffee) was established in 1997 in Yunnan Province, China. From the beginning it had embraced improvisation—in both its founding of a coffee plantation in China to its decision to produce specialty beans. In early 2020, just as Wowing Coffee explored the new and innovative idea of pairing its coffee estate with tourism opportunities, the outbreak of COVID-19 disrupted everything. With opportunities and challenges coexisting, where would Wowing Coffee go? Who would they sell their specialty coffee to during the lockdown period, and how should they sell it? Should they continue to invest in exploring new tourism opportunities within the plantation or return to supplying raw materials, like they had in the past, just to survive?
In July 2023, managers at Exide Industries Limited (EIL), a prominent player in India’s power-storage industry, faced a pivotal decision during a strategic workshop led by the company’s managing director and chief executive officer. The company had been presented with a groundbreaking yet uncertain opportunity: to develop a metaverse-powered platform for battery customization and testing. This initiative, championed by the chief information officer, aimed to address specific challenges faced by EIL’s original-equipment-manufacturer clients. However, the decision to invest in the metaverse was complex and laden with uncertainties regarding the technology’s future and its alignment with EIL’s strategic goals. The company would have to evaluate the potential risks and benefits of adopting this new technology in order to decide whether or not to proceed with this ambitious project.
<p align="justify">Established in 2002, Chengdu, China’s Four Inter Catering Group Co. Ltd. (Four Inter) was a company specializing in Sichuan cuisine and Sichuan culture dissemination. After 21 years of development, Four Inter formed a business model that emphasized both inheritance and innovation of Sichuan cuisine and provided a broader channel for its growth. In 2023, as COVID-19 came to an end, the food and beverage industry ushered in a new round of development. But Four Inter was caught in the predicament of a regional business model. At this juncture of development, Xiaohong Xu, chairperson and CEO of Four Inter, needed to make a decision about the company’s future direction. Should it deepen the awareness of existing brands (refine) or explore the unknown map (expand)?
Cofounders of the Berlin-based startup Bone Brox developed a traditional bone broth made from organic, pasture-fed cattle and free-range chickens. Although they had a polarizing product, the founders tapped into the health and awareness trend and managed to gain market attention and secure government funding. The startup defined itself with a flat hierarchy, open communication, and shared decision-making. However, the company faced challenges, such as the impact of a flat hierarchy on business success and efficient decision-making, a highly competitive market, and the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.
In 1998, after closely monitoring the development of the Chinese agricultural machinery market, Kubota Corporation established Kubota Agricultural Machinery Suzhou Co. Ltd. (Kubota) as its first wholly-owned subsidiary, in Jiangsu, China. Kubota’s market entry process began with semi-feed rice harvesters. It was followed by the gradual introduction and development of various other models of agricultural machines. The business grew continuously along with the development of the Chinese market economy, earning it a place among China’s leading companies in the paddy field market. Kubota then took steps to enter the dry field farming industry and become a comprehensive agricultural machinery enterprise. However, the results fell far short of expectations. The rise of domestic competitors continued to erode Kubota’s share of the paddy field machinery market. The company then faced more challenges related to intense competition, technological innovation, and the Chinese government’s introduction of the National IV environmental policy. Could Kubota regain its competitive advantage in China’s agricultural machinery market?
At the end of March 2023, Gagan Kanwar, the owner of 39 Bakers, a bakery based in Jammu, India, called a meeting with his store managers to discuss expanding the business by moving online. The bakery had multiple outlets in Jammu, but rival bakeries in the area had successfully transitioned to the online space and experienced notable growth. Customers everywhere were clearly embracing online shopping. Kanwar understood that online was the way forward, as it could be used not only for fulfilling his expansion strategy but also for boosting revenue and improving customer relationships. But he also knew that developing digital infrastructure, such as a website, mobile app, and social media presence, and working with online food delivery platforms would require significant investments of time, money, and labour. Expanding through franchises, on the other hand, could be more cost-effective. Was it the right time to go online? Would the online channel strategy help 39 Bakers strengthen its customer base? How could an offline-dominant retail outlet transition from brick to click?
Ballard Power Systems Inc. (Ballard) was a pioneer and world leader in hydrogen fuel cell power system development and commercialization, employing over 1,100 employees worldwide, with operations in China, Europe, and North America. However, despite its strong revenue growth, Ballard had failed to report positive operating income since 1993. At the end of 2022, a new round of government support for green technologies had the potential to change things for Ballard. The company now faced the question of whether to expand its operations in China, previously its major market, or shift its focus more toward North America and Europe. Factors to consider included geopolitical tensions and government funding. What steps should Ballard take next?
The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding was a world-renowned giant panda research institution and tourism destination and had successfully attracted millions of tourists since its opening. The surge in tourists, however, had also increased pressure to provide a tourist-friendly experience, and long wait times generated more complaints than any other issue. Tourists experienced long queues at the ticket offices and at the entrances of the panda house and delivery room, which greatly impacted their experience. Moreover, long queues also created other issues, such as managing crowding and the negative impacts on the giant pandas’ emotional and psychological health as a result of the noise generated by tourists waiting in lines.
Teresa Ward, founder of Grandma Treesaw’s Bannock (GTB), had recently received positive media coverage from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was hoping to leverage it to grow her Yukon-based bannock-mix business. She was considering two options: expand her direct to consumer offer by working with Shopify Inc. to improve GTB’s e-commerce sales or grow her product portfolio by introducing two new flavours of bannock mix. A few questions loomed in Teresa’s mind: Could she do both? Did GTB have the organizational resources to pursue this expansion plan successfully? What should her implementation timeline look like? What financial analysis would need to be done to support the decision-making process? She wanted to decide which option to pursue in the next three to four weeks.
Amid the global shift towards remote working, Brad Merchant of Triovest uses a systems thinking approach to examine the evolving dynamics of office spaces. As corporations debate remote work, the demand for physical offices is in question. Triovest, a Canadian commercial real estate firm, is strategizing with a working investment thesis, "The Future of the Office." This approach involves buying undervalued office properties, modernizing them, and reselling them. Merchant and his team need to predict the interplay between remote and communal workspaces in their investment decisions. Would Triovest’s investment thesis affect these trends—or vice versa?
<p align="justify">Mamaearth, founded in 2016, started as a direct-to-consumer personal-care brand and carved a niche for itself as a trusted, toxin-free baby-care, skin-care, and hair-care brand in a competitive Indian personal-care market landscape that included established multinationals. In 2022, its parent company, Honasa Consumer Private Limited (HCL), raised $52 million in financing for a valuation of US $1.2 billion, becoming the first unicorn of 2022. HCL also acquired BBlunt, a hair-care and styling-products business in a ₹1.34 billion deal that was seen as a significant step toward meeting Mamaearth’s growth aspirations.<br><br> In a competitive personal-care market landscape, the leading companies had realized health-aware consumers’ need for natural and toxin-free products and were innovating and aggressively pushing chemical-free products. Mamaearth now faced a challenge in taking the next leap forward: it needed to grow its market, retain its sustainable positioning, determine its consumer segment, and build a communication strategy around these factors as a trusted, toxin-free skin-care and hair-care company.
Fundrr was a South Africa-based alternative funding business that launched in 2018. The business’s goal had been to disrupt the South African business lending landscape, specifically at the small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) level where the majority (about 71 per cent) of SMEs generated annual revenues of less than R200,000 and employed between two and five people. Reflecting on the company’s journey in October 2021, the company’s founders realized that Fundrr had weathered the COVID-19 storm and had grown 630 per cent between September 2020 and September 30, 2021. However, there was a discrepancy between their current client base and the founders’ vision for the company as a disruptive, innovative, entrepreneurship-friendly alternative funder seeking to offer financial backing options independent of those granted by traditional banking institutions. The typical Fundrr client was usually in their fifties and male. Operating on a continent with the youngest population in the world, what did this say about their marketing and brand positioning? How could they apply the same resourcefulness and relevance to position the business into the future?
The mission of Fairphone, an Amsterdam, Netherlands-based social enterprise company, was to design, produce, and sell smartphones that had a more positive impact on the environment and society. Fairphone was rated as the most sustainable smartphone in 2021 and was considered as a champion for the circular economy in the smartphone industry. Since 2018, Fairphone had been headed by Eva Gouwens. Under Gouwens’s leadership, Fairphone had more than doubled sales between 2018 and 2019. Sales were an important measure of impact for Fairphone and a driver for much of its strategy. In 2021, Fairphone announced a distribution agreement with Vodafone Group plc, the launch of a new flagship phone, and expanded recycling services. Fairphone now wanted to consider how to rapidly scale its impact in 2022 and beyond, and determine how it could increase sales. Should it consider new markets or new offerings? Or should Gouwens shift Fairphone’s focus from sales to some other strategic goal?
<p align="justify">EatSure was the direct-to-customer platform of Rebel Foods, an internet-based restaurant. EatSure was positioned as a digital food court compared to online food aggregators and other companies in the food-service industry. Sagar Kochhar, chief executive officer of EatSure, had a meeting with his executive team to discuss the company’s goal of reaching fifty million EatSure app users. EatSure had recently reached more than seven million downloads. The team met to analyze EatSure’s positioning with respect to other food-delivery competitors following recent market research and the creation of a perceptual map. Kochhar wanted to understand the company’s existing market position and decide on a future course of action to meet this growth goal.
Inter IKEA Systems B.V. (IKEA) entered Korea at a relatively late stage of its global expansion and encountered an overwhelmingly positive customer response, which emboldened it to open several additional stores at a relatively fast pace. However, IKEA encountered much stronger headwinds after the COVID-19 pandemic hit Korea. It had to shift to online sales channels, mitigate customer dissatisfaction, face aggressive Korean competitors, accommodate a major slump in furniture demand, and address employee dissatisfaction and strong demands from its labour union. What could the company do to address these challenges and renew its success?
<p align="justify">The case describes how Zhuiyi, a leading conversational artificial intelligence (AI) start-up in China, developed its growth strategy and made transitions in the face of product commercialization challenges. The crux lies in the low customer satisfaction rate of AI products, which could be endogenously attributed to mismatched expectations among customers and the founding team in the product development process as well as to the lack of vertical industry knowledge among executives and employees. Zhuiyi needs to make a strategic choice between: a) developing new AI products by making large and risky research-and-development investments or b) devoting more resources to product customization and expanding the market through client diversification.
Neeraj Bakshi, who bought a vodka distillery in 2019 in Mississauga, Ontario, had big dreams for the distillery and purchased a 2.5-hectare property in Welland, Ontario, to increase its production capacity. Bakshi had invested significantly in NB Distillers, which now produced three types of vodka, two types of whisky, and one type of gin, and he wanted to see nothing but success. He had advertised on billboards, bus shelters, and radio, but he wanted to spend his communication budget more strategically and was open to trying new ideas. Now, in May 2021, he needed answers to several important questions: What audience segment should NB Distillers target? How should Bakshi position the distillery? What other promotional tools might help him achieve greater brand awareness?
In the quarter ending March 2022, Apple Inc. (Apple)’s share in the Chinese smartphone market fell to 17.9 per cent from 21.7 per cent in the previous quarter. Business analysts attributed the falling share to weak consumer sentiments; a lack of innovations; and major supply-side headwinds, including frequent COVID-related lockdowns in China, power shortages, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the trade and technology war between the United States and China. Apple needed to identify strategies to gain a leading share in the Chinese market. In the face of demand- and supply-side adversities in China, it also needed to reconsider its supply chain and manufacturing base. Should Apple keep its supply chain concentrated in China, to reap the benefits arising from the economies of scale in the production process? Or should it pursue geographic diversification for its supply chain, to protect itself from the major problems hovering on the horizon?