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Conventional wisdom suggests that marketers should play it safe in a polarized culture and focus on potential customers who haven't yet made up their minds those in the middle, where the majority of the market is. But brand messaging can be more effective if it targets the subcultures that are strong brand supporters. Using McDonald's successful fan-driven marketing strategy as an example, the author describes how the propagation effect can leverage existing customers to win over new ones.

Trinity Earth, founded by Zhu Jinfu, was a Chinese data solution provider focusing on the film and television industry. Since its establishment, Trinity Earth had launched a mix of products and services and continuously created value for the whole industry. While its earliest products tended to be functional tools, the company proceeded to synthesize these products for empowering and then enabling its clients. It started by acquiring data as a potential resource and proceeded to tap into this valuable asset which it ultimately aspired to capitalize.In the same time, the business model of Trinity Earth also changed a lot. The value of its data services was not a monolith, but was derived from collaboration on four levels - data, computing, analytics and human-machine interaction - with their own ways to generate revenues whose significance varied as the company kept developing. In the initial stage, profits came from product sales. With the enrichment and refinement of products, Trinity Earth turned to building a comprehensive network and hence its unique competence. However, with the rapid development of the film and television industry in China, Trinity Earth found itself difficult to fit into the mainstream, or majority market. What were the reasons？What would Zhu and Trinity Earth do to deal with this challenge?

Companies frequently consider diversification to be a crucial strategic decision during their growth journey to mitigate business risks and pursue continued expansion. Nonetheless, when pursuing diversified expansion, companies must accurately identify the suitable industry or domain and maintain a balanced relationship between specialization and diversification. Failure to do so can have negative repercussions on their development. This case study centers around Adisseo, a well-established company specializing in animal feed additives, and examines their diversification efforts in addition to their primary operations, such as methionine, by accelerating the development of other businesses through various means. This case primarily addresses the following inquiries: How did Adisseo cultivate its core competencies throughout its eight-decade-long development? What is Adisseo's position in the global methionine industry and what strengths does it possess? Who are Adisseo's competitors in this sector, and what challenges does the company encounter? Additionally, the case examines the progress of Adisseo's other business ventures apart from methionine and identifies their competitors and challenges. It also evaluates the accomplishments resulting from the implementation of Adisseo's "two-business-pillar" strategy, as well as the problems the company faces. Adisseo's explorations and practices offer valuable insights for similar enterprises facing technical barriers and pursuing diversification.

"Vail Resorts, one of the world's largest snow sports resort management companies, faces serious climate change issues. For years, the organization tried to deal with rising temperatures and less snowfall by growing its resort network and diversifying its product portfolio to extend its season. Alicia Campero, Vail Resorts' Vice President of Sustainability Strategy, was leading the corporate effort to contain the company's environmental footprint while also limiting its business exposure to poor snow conditions. How should she handle negative press coverage or the intense competition from their rivals? Will she be able to provide significant value to millions of skiers and snowboarders during their resort visits? Can she manage the weather-related revenue risk and improve the company's profitability with strategic global expansion? Can she overcome the challenges of managing differences when expanding abroad in 2023? Using publicly available ski industry statistics, climate data, and country-level cultural indices, readers of this case assume the role of Campero and her team. Students must make strategic decisions about what the organization will do regarding climate change. The case provides facts on Vail Resorts' multitude of property acquisitions, stock performance, finances, and competitors, which will help readers make strategic recommendations on where the company should focus its next major geographic expansion."

Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can create new content (e.g., text, image, or audio) in response to a prompt from a user. ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude are examples of text generating AIs, and DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are examples of the image-generating variety. During training, a generative AI learns the underlying structure of the desired output by absorbing a mass of relevant data - all of the books in the public domain, for example, or petabytes of text scraped from across the internet. Once trained, generative AIs work by creating outputs that recreate, with calculated variation, the underlying patterns learned in training. In 2023, all these types of generative AI were created in a similar process. At the core of any generative AI system is the model, a mathematical representation of patterns that forms the basis of 'knowledge' for the system. The structure of the model is determined by its architecture, the theoretical organization of parameters in an artificial neural networks that the system uses to generate its outputs. To learn, the model relies on a mountain of training data, a collection of examples relevant to the task the model is being trained to perform. During an initial pre-training process, the model learns to adjust its parameter-weights (assumed by the architecture), improving its prediction quality with many iterations over time; that model is further refined through a fine-tuning process. Training an AI system requires specialized hardware, like GPUs in data centers, that consume enormous amounts of electricity to handle heavy and massively-parallel computational loads.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is ubiquitous in today's public discourse, underpinned by societal recognition of inequality and demands for less discrimination. Further, DEI increasingly serves as a resource for brands to express their identity and align with consumer values. However, implementing DEI as a brand management strategy requires more than lip service and poses risks if not properly embraced. For instance, consumers can perceive DEI initiatives as inauthentic, or initiatives can miss the mark with target consumer groups when poorly executed. Because brands are now more inclined to take responsibility and a public stance on sociopolitical issues, we take a step back and discuss key considerations and opportunities for brands to embrace DEI. We first document the case for DEI in brand management. Next, we present the consumer and brand perspectives of DEI before unpacking the considerations and opportunities of embracing DEI for brand management. Overall, our manuscript provides guidance for brands, marketers, regulators, and policy makers to better understand the role of DEI for brand management.

Perfect Diary is the first Chinese beauty brand based on a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business model. Launched by Yixian E-Commerce in 2017, it is designed to be an affordable alternative to foreign cosmetics brands, targeting Gen Zs and millennials in China. It was the number one brand in China's online color cosmetics market in 2019. Its parent company Yixian went public under the name Yatsen Holding Limited (NYSE:YSG) in November 2020. The brand had achieved enviable growth from startup, with revenue reaching USD655.2mn in 2021. However, things soon took a downturn for Perfect Diary. Growth stalled, and eventually its sales started to decline in 2022. The case aims to (1) illustrate how Perfect Diary used a blue ocean strategy and internet strategy to grow and expand; (2) identify the key reasons of its rapid decline; and (3) explore strategic options for the brand to regain success.

The biopharmaceutical sector’s innovation- and growth-focused activities are having a surprising side effect—they’re building organizational resilience at a time of inflation, looming economic downturn, and scarcity of the right skills and talent. This offers relevant lessons for all other industries. The idea of building resilience may most often be associated with “playing defense” through cost-cutting and efficiency moves, but it can also stem from new and more rapid ways of leveraging invention and innovation driven by purpose. To understand how, the authors recommend taking a closer look at the “New Science” of some biopharma companies. New Science combines the best of what biopharmas know on the scientific front with the best of what technology can offer to target disease areas where no treatments or cures exist. According to Accenture’s research, the three significant benefits of New Science are improving the chances of creating viable offerings, reducing the cost of innovation, and driving revenue growth. While scientific novelty, technology convergence, and unmet patient needs are the guiding principles of New Science, transferring these basics to other industries requires shifting a company’s essence toward innovation with purpose. This article offers three practical steps to make that happen. First, reorient the portfolio: business leaders must pursue new products and services, new markets, and new ecosystems to address unmet needs. Second, flip the budget: senior executives need to free up capital to invest in innovation activities. Third, create dynamic teams: applying the principles of New Science requires forming new kinds of teams—human teams and “human + machine” teams.

Early detection of weak external signals is increasingly critical for strategic agility. While many organizations scan for weak signals, most dismiss them as anomalies, principally due to poor amplification strategies. Several challenges hinder the necessary amplification and sensemaking of weak signals for organizational awareness. This article analyzes 139 proof-of-concept projects with startups and 15 interviews with executives involved in the projects at a leading German mobility corporation, and it reveals four actions to amplify weak external signals, thereby enhancing organizational hyper-awareness. It illustrates the actions with examples and presents the implications for both weak signals and strategic agility management.

Although agility is often associated with rapid speed and flexibility, having processes for "deep reflection" is also crucial. This includes the need for collective dialogs across and outside organizations to build greater awareness of, and attention to, strategic issues. How do managers involve a wider range of stakeholder voices in strategy as they pursue agility? This article identifies three practices that synergistically contribute to agility and conceptualizes them in a framework for managers called the "Strategy Making as Polyphony Wheel." The work outlines several implications for managerial practice and research.

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?

In this second article in a series of four, the researchers behind the 2023 MIT Sloan Management Review-BCG Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy Big Ideas research project offer a framework improve-create-establish, or ICE for enhancing strategic measurement with artificial intelligence. Examples from companies such as Wayfair and DBS Bank help illustrate the potential benefits of using AI to improve KPIs.

The case documents the challenges of Priya Nadkarni and Digvijay Singh, the cofounders of Mrida Education and Welfare Society (MEWS). Recognizing the need for intervention at a much early stage of learning to alter the mindset and nurture a love for learning, the duo established the Riverside Natural School (RNS) under MEWS in 2016. RNS introduced innovative teaching models drawing on the tribal children's innate cultural capital and core strengths by integrating sports, computers, robotics, and other new-age technologies with the conventional formal education curriculum. The aim was to make the tribal children of the Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh develop a love for learning, gain worldly exposure, develop higher aspirations to become education-oriented, and thus be ready to take up jobs without any inhibitions. In this process, they identified the inherent socioeconomic issues and started addressing them. The program started showing results, beneficiaries grew in number, and outcomes improved.Also, public and private partnerships started building up for MEWS. What started with pre-primary to class four expanded to offer the program up to class seven. As children at the RNS started progressing to higher classes, Nadkarni and Singh felt the need to transition to a fully residential higher secondary school. This warranted extensive investment in infrastructure. With a nearly fully subsidized service model and reliance on donations, predominantly from individuals, Mrida had to mobilize funds for its expansion. In addition to funding, Nadkarni and Singh stared at a formidable human resources (HR) challenge compounded by the project's non-profit nature and geographic location.

In early 2018, WhatsApp—the cross-platform messaging and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service—began testing its WhatsApp Payments (Payments) service, designed to enable digital payment transactions in India. By late 2020, the platform had rolled out the initial launch of its Payments feature within India, with the National Payments Corporation of India agreeing to a staggered launch. However, despite the number of Payments users increasing from twenty million to forty million between November 2021 and April 2022, the platform witnessed stagnation in customer retention due to faulty transactions and inefficient processes that resulted in driving customers away. WhatsApp’s challenge was to review its customer value proposition to gain new customers and retain existing ones. How should it communicate this customer value proposition to its target customer base to attract new users? Would it be more appropriate to launch Payments as a standalone app?

Regulated utilities are required to file an integrated resource plan (IRP) with their state regulators for power plants they want to operate, shut down, or build. Traditionally, the focus of electricity providers' IRPs has been to ensure adequacy of supply at the lowest cost of delivered power. In the United States, coal and gas plants have historically dominated the generation mix. Nuclear, which is a non-carbon alternative, has been only moderately successful due to frequent cost overruns and safety issues (i.e., Three Mile Island and Fukushima). Almost all utility plant decisions are long term in nature (at least 30 years), so picking the right set of options is very important. Renewables-solar, wind, storage, etc.-have not been deployed widely in the generation mix until now because (1) they typically don't run 24/7 and thus cannot guarantee power to be available when needed, and (2) their installation costs have been higher than alternatives, although have decreased over time. This case examines how one regulated utility, Duke Energy, deals with these challenges in North Carolina. Company leadership has committed to exiting coal plants by 2030 and achieving net zero-carbon by 2050. The specifics of which coal plants should be shut down and when, what types of plants replace these coal plants, how much these new plants cost to build, and who pays for the transition are all questions students must address in this case.

Spreadsheet Supplement for Case W53C70

Fresh Routes, a not-for-profit social enterprise with the mission of advancing local food security, was focused on creating new and innovative ways of providing healthy and affordable food to as many people as possible in the Canadian cities of Calgary and Edmonton. As the global COVID-19 pandemic raged in 2020-21, Fresh Routes found itself questioning if it could still provide its much-needed services. Demand was exponentially increasing as more and more people experienced food insecurity due to the pandemic's impact on their employment status, mobility, and health. Would Fresh Routes be able to find a new way to operate, or would the company need to shut down its operations?

This case describes the challenges faced by Thoughtworks China (hereinafter ""Thoughtworks"") and Yuelong Automobile (hereinafter ""Yuelong"") while working together on the development of a digital tool for Yuelong car owners: What did they aim to achieve through innovation-beat the competition or meet consumer needs? Was this digital transformation project beyond the purview of Yuelong's New Retail Department, with General Manager Wang Jie championing it directly? Was market research needed to explore innovation opportunities? Should they consider all users' pain points and needs or focus solely on key issues? What issues should be prioritized-high-value or high-risk ones? Should the company adapt to market change after the launch of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)? Which department should manage this innovative digital product? How should they transcend temporal and spatial boundaries to replicate such an innovation product?Clues can be found in Thoughtworks' agile innovation process. As described in the case, only one month after release, the app co-developed by Thoughtworks and Yuelong, the result of intense debate between the pair, was well-received by the market. In January 2021, Zhang Min, Chairperson of Tengfei Group, Yuelong's parent company, invited Wang Jie, Yuelong's General Manager, Li Chuang, Yuelong's Director of New Retail Department, and Zhao Xin, Thoughtworks' Chief Project Manager, to discuss how to replicate the app's development process and apply it to other Tengfei subsidiaries. While the digital age continuously demanded innovation from carmakers, Zhao knew these subsidiaries needed to understand their market position and priorities before introducing new tools rather than simply following the latest digital trends. This case may spark further discussions about the difficulties with product innovation, helping students understand the characteristics and applications of Thoughtworks' agile innovation methodology.

Vanessa Keitges stepped into the role of CEO at Columbia Green Technologies (CGT) in 2010, growing it to become the dominant green infrastructure and green roofing materials supplier on the West Coast. The Portland, Oregon-based company offered customizable green roofing systems that harnessed nature-based technologies to mitigate the damage caused by stormwater runoff. With 2500 roof garden installations under her belt Keitges wanted to scale her sales and marketing operation to capture the emerging opportunity across the North American market. The green roofing industry was projected to experience a CAGR of 16.2%, building to a $5.37 billion global opportunity by 2030. Working with her executive team, Keitges was preparing for a Q1 2023 Series C funding round to finance the major rollout of her business. The immediate question was where to locate CGT's expanded sales force and how to prioritize the targeted geographic markets. Compelling business rationale, as well as opportunity framing to mitigate the known gender bias in VC funding, would need to be reflected in the eventual funding pitch.

Spreadsheet Suppliment for Case NA0794