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After the successful release of the first Hunger Games film in 2012, the film's distributor, Lionsgate, was preparing to release the next movie in the series, Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Fan expectations had grown after the success of Hunger Games and Lionsgate faced the challenge of keeping moviegoers interested and engaged in another Hunger Games movie. In an era marked by the rising popularity of digital and social media, Lionsgate knew that attracting fans to a sequel meant pushing the boundaries of traditional marketing tactics. Digital brand storytelling is about using digital media in a holistic way to tell a brand story and build excitement for an audience. Brand storytelling seeks to make a connection with the audience by giving them an emotional experience that resonates with them. While Lionsgate was aware that traditional marketing would need to be blended with a digital campaign to bring in moviegoers, it also needed to strike a careful balance between the two and choose the appropriate platforms to tell a cohesive story. Should Lionsgate launch a brand storytelling campaign to appeal to fans? Lionsgate's comparatively small marketing team gathered to brainstorm about how to execute such a campaign and position the film for another big success.

The purpose of this case is to illustrate why Napa Valley wine producers find it both irresistible and challenging to enter the growing Chinese wine market. Over the course of the 2000s, China went from being the 51st largest wine importer in the world to the 5th. While the Chinese consumer has an interest in foreign wine and significant discretionary income, logistical, regulatory, and cultural barriers prevent Napa Valley wineries from easily entering the market and achieving economic success. Frederick Family Vineyards, a fictional, family-run Napa Valley wine company, is interested in expanding distribution into China. The company must determine whether this geographic expansion is economically viable and then determine which go-to-market strategy will best position the firm for success. The company is deciding between four potential strategies: (1) Utilize traditional import and distribution channels (2) Leverage online sales (3) Partner with a logistics provider (4) Create a Chinese investment. Frederick Family Vineyards grapples with this decision in the face of imperfect information and an ever-changing market landscape due to President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption measures. Few luxury goods were more effected by these measures than wines and spirits. Prior to 2013, an estimated 80 percent of luxury wine imported into China was distributed as gifts, and used to help cement deals and relationships. Now global wine producers are left to wonder how Chinese demand for foreign wine will change as a result of these broader governmental changes.

Ethan Anderson, the CEO of San Francisco-based e-commerce company MyTime, must decide on the company's growth strategy. MyTime's first product was a website and mobile app that offered consumers a convenient way to book appointments with local merchants throughout the United States. Student must assess the company's growth strategy and develop a model to value a prospective customer to the company's website.

Kevin Borders and Joe Golden, co-founders and co-CEOs of Collage.com, must decide how to grow their custom photo-products startup in the face of fierce competition. From 2011 through 2016, the business evolved from a hobby to a startup with $22 million in revenue and 45 employees, all of whom worked remotely from home. Customer acquisition was becoming more difficult and repeat purchase rates lagged behind Shutterfly, the industry leader. New hires would help to integrate new products and grow marketing efforts, but several experienced team members wondered whether virtual collaboration could continue to work with an influx of new people.

Spectio Tech, founded in 2005, developed and implemented intelligent LED lighting solutions for the industrial market. Sensors and wireless connectivity embedded in its LED fixtures not only significantly reduced lighting-related energy use-by up to 90% in some cases-but also served as a tool for the Internet of Things (IoT) to expose powerful insights about facility use. Yet in 2016, few of Spectio's customers were fully embracing the system as an IoT product. Both LED lighting and IoT were rapidly evolving markets, and Spectio had to decide if it should focus on driving down lighting hardware costs to expand its total addressable market or on improving the software controls to enhance the system's IoT functionality.

In July 2016, while on his annual China tour to help promote the sportswear brand Li-Ning, basketball superstar Dwyane Wade and his long-time business manager Lisa Joseph-Metelus face a decision regarding one of his other business partnerships-that with the American company Stance, known for its colorful socks. Involved with the young company since 2013, Wade quickly established himself as Stance's most successful brand ambassador. But recently, several younger players had also come on board as endorsers, and Stance had entered into an overall sponsorship deal with the NBA. With his Stance deal coming up for renewal in October 2016, what kind of deal should Wade and Joseph-Metelus propose to Stance? And how would a newly structured partnership fit into Wade's overall business portfolio-including his plans for after his active basketball career?

This case describes Hewlett Packard Enteprise's "Dandelion Program," which has developed a new service offering for the company's clients by drawing on the special talents of people with autism. The company has deployed "pods" organized around 8 or 9 employees with autism, to function as high performance mini-ecosystems, which have turned out to be 30% more effective than average service teams (in some areas). The case centers around questions of how to adapt this successful model to new demands in a different service domain, specifically, cybersecurity and defense related areas. The case also explores how the company is innovating and refining its assessment and training processes in support of the program.

In 2016 against the backdrop of a challenging Chinese macroeconomic environment, SOHO China, the largest owner and developer of Class-A real estate in Beijing and Shanghai, was struggling to convince analysts of the merits of their new "build-to-hold" strategy. Founded as a merchant builder, the company went public in 2007 raising a record USD 1.9 billion, but the firm, led by Zhang Xin, refocused in 2012 towards a "build-to-hold" strategy in an effort to capture the long-term value of their properties. Ms. Zhang also saw an opportunity to capitalize on the rapidly growing "shared office" trend developing their own '3Q' coworking product placing these centers in their newly held buildings. Despite 3Q's initial success and the "build-to-hold" strategy beginning to bear fruit, SOHO's stock price was still near record lows. How could Zhang Xin educate the stock market to reward SOHO's share price and acknowledge the successful transition? Would these strategic decisions be sufficient to steer SOHO China through new economic hurdles? Is 3Q enough to buoy SOHO's performance and bring them into the next phase of growth?

Pi was a large family office pioneering the concept of 100% portfolio impact investing. Tasked with preserving capital, generating moderate returns and advancing the family's social justice goals - Pi's Managing Directors had to identify appropriate products across asset classes. In this case, students will be required to assess an investment in HCAP Partners Fund III from the perspective of Pi and whether such an investment meets the family's core criteria.

In May 2015 Paulo Campos, Co-Founder and CEO of Zalora Philippines, found himself at a crucial turning point in his young company's development. In just three years, Zalora had come from entering the Philippine fashion retail industry as an unknown quantity to becoming a household name across the Southeast Asian archipelago. Campos and his team had achieved much in this time: launching one of the first online retailers in the country, building a logistics network from scratch, acquiring customers at an astonishing pace, and signing up major brands to offer on Zalora.com.ph. But now his investors were ready for him to shift gears and focus on turning a profit within the next two years. Zalora Philippines was part of Zalora Group, a Singapore-headquartered online fashion retailer that operated across Southeast Asia. Zalora Group, in turn, was part of a global entity called Global Fashion Group (GFG), which owned online fashion retailers and brands in emerging markets across the world. In addition to Zalora in Southeast Asia, GFG owned Dafiti in South America, Namshi in the Middle East, Jabong in South Asia, Lamoda in Eastern Europe, and The Iconic in Australia. GFG's principal investors were Kinnevik, a Swedish investment company, and Rocket Internet.

On February 27, 2010, Chile was razed by a three-minute earthquake of 8.8 magnitude on the Richter scale. More than 500 people died and nearly 400,000 homes were destroyed. The overall cost was estimated at US$20 billion. Over 70 per cent of the people who had died in the earthquake were from the coastal town of Constitución. Celulosa Arauco y Constitución (Arauco), a Chilean-based forestry and timber company, was Constitución's largest employer. Arauco's pulp mill and major sawmill in Constitución was completely destroyed, and all but one of the 34 remaining manufacturing facilities were wiped out. The company's executives moved rapidly to respond to the crisis and create a plan to rebuild Constitución. By the end of April 2010, Arauco's pulp business in Chile was operating at 70 per cent capacity and in May, the company's pulp mill in Constitución reopened. However, the disaster had left an indelible imprint on Arauco's vision and values. The company had been thinking about pursuing further innovation. The company's values of efficiency and productivity had been tested with an environmental disaster in 2005, but innovation was still limited. Then in 2009, an opportunity provided Arauco with the ability to engage innovation on a larger scale. But the earthquake and rebuilding efforts now required the company's full attention. Should Arauco proceed with its innovation, and if so how would Arauco balance these two different objectives?

A writer of computer code, who bought and sold tech company stocks, is asked by one of his friends, who was contemplating buying some Microsoft stock, to help him understand the Microsoft/Nokia deal.

The president of Cloud Syzygy Technologies (CST) had recently returned from the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference, where he discussed ways in which cloud computing had transformed industries. He knew that in the future, the real opportunities lay in the cloud and not in traditional internal IT solutions. As the executive in charge of CST, he wished to develop a plan to grow the business, which would include a clear message to his customers about the merits of cloud computing. He recognized that cloud computing provided many opportunities and risks for corporations seeking to take advantage of new and innovative technologies. He was tasked with presenting a ranking and assessment of CST's new products to the board at the next meeting.

The case looks at United Airlines when it is facing a decision on whether to shift its aircraft routing to more "out-and-back" routing in order to try to improve its on time performance. As one of the world's largest airlines, United had a very large fleet and hub-and-spoke network that provided passengers with a wide range of destination choices, but as with any complex system unless everything ran perfectly all the time, it inevitably faced cascading delays and missed passenger connection problems. While out-and-back routing tended to isolate operational issues, more traditional linear routings tended to offer high equipment utilization. The case offers students an opportunity to examine the effects of variability on different routing strategies.

In late 2015, Dr. Shehan Dissanayake, a managing director and board member of the Bahamian-based investment firm The Tavistock Group (Tavistock), the largest single shareholder in the Australian Agricultural Company (AACo), one of the country's largest agribusinesses, faces a potentially challenging future operating environment in Australia. The country's national government has recently instituted changes to its agricultural foreign direct investment (FDI) policies that could affect Tavistock's future goals for its long-term investment in AACo. These regulatory changes were made in response to popular and political concern over increased foreign interest in and ownership of Australian land and real estate. Due to the newness of the regulatory changes, it was unclear at the moment precisely how they would affect AACo, but as a foreign-owned company, it was likely to face more rigorous screenings and oversight as it grew. How could Dissanayake best manage Tavistock's investment in this uncertain political climate?

The case examines the career of Joan Bavaria, a pioneer of Socially Responsible Investing,and founder of Trillium Asset Management and Ceres, the non-profit organization advocating for sustainability leadership. It describes her personal journey from art student and college drop out to financier and campaigner for corporate sustainability. Trillium grew out of Bavaria's initial work in Boston-based Franklin Research and Development Corporation, and became an independent entity in 1982. Bavaria argued that investment houses could use their funds to promote corporate social responsibility, and that such investments could be profitable. This was considered extremely unorthodox in the industry at the time. In the wake of the giant oil spill from the tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989, Bavaria launced the Ceres Principles aimed to generate standardized corporate reporting on enviromental performance. Ceres grew as an organization and launched the Global Reporting Initiative in 1997. The case provides an opportunity to explore the opportunities and challenges of both SRI and corporate environmental reporting.

Singapore Safety Glass, a 27-year-old manufacturer of customised glass solutions for buildings, had built a reputation on its high product quality. Faced with increased competition from China, and the tightening flow of foreign labour supply into Singapore, how should the company change its business model and people management practices to sustain and grow its business?

In 1995, before people "googled" or "yelped," Angela Hicks (HBS, 2000) was establishing her Angie's List as a pioneer in the accumulation and dissemination of consumer rating information. Hicks focused on the home repair and maintenance market and, as she put it, "particularly on high cost of failure situations where good information on potential service providers is correspondingly of high value." Angie's List had a paid subscription model as it charged "members" for access to the information they collectively provided on service providers. More recently, companies such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google have started offering free access to their reviews while relying totally on site advertising and service provider fees for their revenues. In 2015, Angie's List collected close to $68 million in membership fees. In January 2016, with recent declines in the growth rate of member numbers, Angie's List has to decide if it was time to drop the "paid subscription for all" model and introduce a free version of its service to its product line.

Scott Wagner has recently joined GoDaddy, a leading provider of cloud-based software and services that helped individuals and small businesses establish a web presence, in the dual role of chief operating officer and chief financial officer. One of his first tasks is to design a set of performance metrics that can be used to run the business. This case gives students the opportunity to develop a framework for thinking about GoDaddy's business and to design performance metrics that measure the health of the business and guide employee behavior.

Amara Kaggwa leads the small but rapidly expanding sales team at ZenRecruit, a recruiting software application used by small businesses. Armed with six months of sales performance metrics, Kaggwa is preparing for her monthly performance conversations with two under-performing sales people. This case concerns a metrics-driven sales organization, challenges the students to combine quantitative and qualitative observations to craft productive sales coaching plans, and provides students with the opportunity to role play these difficult yet important performance-review discussions. It is suitable for Sales, Marketing, Organizational Behavior, and Entrepreneurial Management courses.