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The Women’s US Soccer team in 2016 entered into the summer Olympics with a dark cloud over their heads, the lack of pay equity in the sport of soccer. Despite being heralded as the best female team in the world, the team’s compensation does not reflect their winning record or average work performance. Complex contractual negotiations and compensation intricacies surround this situation and the legal proceedings with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that include discrepancies between gender preferences for compensation, benefits packages and terms of the overall collective bargaining agreement in a monopsony. The financial impact of lost wages and the role of the fan base are also examined.

This case has been created through the eyes of past and current members of the US Women’s Soccer team using scholarly and periodical sources.

This case is designed for upper level, undergraduate human resource management, labor economics and employment law courses, specifically, principles of human resource management, gender equity courses, business law, labor economics, law & economics.

Subject areas are strategic management and marketing management.

This case can be used in strategic management and marketing management courses for MBA students.

This case discusses the future of petroleum business at Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) – whether to stay or exit. This scenario took place between 2001 and 2008. The volatility in the external environment was beyond their control. Or was it so? This case encapsulates the characteristics of innovative strategy formulation, leading to successful differentiation in a regulated and commoditized industry. This case portrays two significant aspects of business strategy by RIL. First is to comprehend the pioneering strategies formulation and implementation by RIL in the petroleum retailing business. Second is the severe impact of external forces on the company’s current and future prospects and what contingency plans could have been made.

This study enables to understand how innovative and differentiation strategies can be successfully applied in a commoditized business; to comprehend the effective application of forward integration and brand extension in a complex, scale-driven industry; and to understand the implication of external threats severely disrupting a growing business.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 11: Strategy

Spark Publishing and Printing House is a comprehensive case on relevant costs analysis for short run alternative choice decisions. It stresses the importance of future differential cash flow analysis and highlights the irrelevance of past and non differential costs for managerial decisions. SPPH is a reputed publishing and printing house. It has two departments: Publishing and Printing and Distribution. SPPH has received a proposal from Fine Printing Press to take up its printing and distribution work for initial period of one year. The managerial decision involved is whether to outsource or to maintain status quo. Relevant cost analysis is to be used to determine which alternative is cost effective.

After completing the case, students should be able to understand: the importance and uniqueness of the individual market and developing a suitable marketing strategy. The concept of value creation and learn the importance of developing the right value proposition to compete and succeed in a market. The target audience and how to create the right marketing mix. Competition in a digital landscape and the importance of developing an appropriate strategy to counter its rivals and position the brand effectively.

During his visit to India in December 2019, Netflix’s founder and chief executive officer Reed Hastings talked about a series of steps the company had taken in the recent past to successfully face stiff competition and move towards achieving its stated target of 100 million viewers. These steps involved significant changes in their marketing mix such as reworking their pricing, developing a rich portfolio of Indian content and building various partnerships. Since Netflix’s launch in India (December 2016), it faced fierce competition from players such as Hotstar and Amazon Prime, both of whom had developed a rich portfolio of Indian content and adopted a very aggressive pricing strategy thus, making these changes essential. At the time of their launch, Netflix had set a very ambitious target of gaining 100 million viewers within five years (by 2021) while adopting a premium pricing strategy and positioning themselves uniquely based on their international content. They quickly learned that they would have to reevaluate their approach if they wanted to achieve their target on time. The changes announced by Hastings were an effort in that direction. The moot question was whether these steps would help Netflix India reach its goal. This challenge was further compounded by an almost 40% hike in data tariffs by three major wireless carriers considering most Indians watched over-the-top media content on their mobile phones.

The case is designed for undergraduates, as well as for fundamental marketing courses in the Master of Business Administration and other graduate level programmes. It can be taught in the Principles of Marketing, Marketing Strategy and International Marketing courses. It is ideal for topics such as understanding the operation of a digital business in a new market, customer value creation and value drivers, brand and brand positioning, product promotion, strategies for business growth and expansion, fighting competition in a digital landscape.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

The purpose of this study is to use design thinking principles to understand the failure of the ‘new’ European Super League, and also understand how it could be redesigned.

This case has been developed from secondary sources, including news reports, social media sites, annual reports and websites of the Union of European Football Associations and the European football clubs. This case was classroom-tested with post-graduate management students in a design thinking course in May 2021 at an Indian business school, S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, in Mumbai, India.

In April 2021, a new football league – the European Super League, is announced as a breakaway rebel league, in direct competition with United European Footballers Association's Champions League. It is backed by the top 12 European clubs and officials in European football, besides the US investment bank, JP Morgan. The new league is touted as one intended to save football. It is, however, denounced by fans and shunned almost universally. The league, which has been planned for the past three and half years, faces collapse. Why did the European Super League fail? How could the founders design a new league?

This case could be used in an undergraduate or MBA classroom or an executive education programme in a design thinking course. It can also be used to teach marketing courses such as marketing strategy, new product development and consumer behaviour.

New product development and introduction, Marketing.

The case is suitable for post-graduate students in management, or in their final year. The case is intended for those business school students who are familiar with the basics of marketing management and are going through a course on new product development. The level of difficulty for post-graduate management students as far as this case is concerned is medium to high. The case can be a part of the following courses in marketing; new product marketing; technology marketing; brand management (how to build a technology brand).

The case concerns a computing technology company – Novatium Solutions – that has developed a new product, an affordable computing system, and is looking at ways of marketing it. The product offering in the initial stages is just hardware with limited local processing abilities that needs to be connected through a wire to a telecom broadband player to provide the internet browsing facility. As the case progresses, the product evolves into upgraded and newer formats. The theme of the case is intended to be new product marketing in a technology sector.

The following will be the learning outcomes for this case; new product process and marketing in a technology company (compared to non technology consumer product company); bringing customer orientation to a product technology company; the role of a marketing head in a new product company; and building a retail brand for an affordable technology product.

Teaching notes are available; please consult your Librarian for access. The teaching notes provide adequate questions and answers (four assignment questions and three class discussion questions) so that faculty members need not look beyond these to give student projects or assignments.

Airtel, the leading mobile operator in India was going to launch the “Airtel Zero” platform that would charge service providers and OTT providers on the internet for mobile data traffic but would allow end consumers free access to the web sites that were signed up for the platform. The case revolves around the questions of pricing these data services to the service providers in a market where the price to one set of customers (the end consumer) was not independent of the price to another set of customers (the OTT service providers) - typical of two sided markets. Issues of net neutrality and competition have been considered alongside.

The learning outcomes of this study are to recall the fundamental concept of revenue management in the hotel industry (remembering); explain the various performance measures used to evaluate room revenue in hotels (understanding); use revenue management strategies to improve room revenue in hotel operations (applying); and examine and evaluate the optimal solution for revenue enhancement, considering factors such as capacity management, duration control and differential pricing (analyzing).

This case study delves into the challenges faced by Hotel King’s Cross, a business hotel located in Pune, Maharashtra, in the year 2022. A week before Christmas Eve, Soham Dande, the hotel’s revenue manager, sought a meeting with Rohan Chopra, the director of sales and marketing, to discuss “revenue optimization for the hotel.”

During their meeting, Dande mentioned that the hotel had fallen behind its budgeted room sales targets for 2022 across various metrics, such as room booking nights, occupancy percentage, average room rate and revenue per available room. Furthermore, the hotel was trailing behind its competitors. The situation was compounded by the management’s decision to raise the targets for 2023 by 5%–7%, factoring in upcoming events, competitive performance and pandemic-related losses over the past two years. Chopra faced the dilemma of formulating an action plan to achieve the ambitious 2023 targets and establish Hotel King’s Cross as a market leader.

Students undertaking executive development programs and graduate-level courses in non-profit hospitality and tourism management, as well as revenue management courses in the executive MBA, management development and graduate MBA programs, may all benefit from this case study.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS12: Tourism and hospitality.

This case provides an opportunity to discuss the design and implementation of a Public Private Partnership project. It describes the Delhi Airport Metro Express Line project from conception to completion, and the subsequent dispute between the Public and Private partners leading to the Concession Agreement going into arbitration. Students discuss the reasons for failure and come up with suggestions for another metro rail project currently in the design stage.

Marketing, strategy, and integrated marketing communication.

The case is suitable for analysis in an MBA level marketing communication course where the theories of hierarchy of effects (HoE) models, push vs pull strategies as well as positioning strategies can be introduced. The case is suitable for analysis in an MBA level marketing course for the module on marketing communications/advertising and promotions.

Sanjay, the regional head of PepsiCo India (eastern region), had been tasked with the preparation of a support plan for a new communication campaign of Mountain Dew, a yellow-coloured drink in PepsiCo's soft-drink portfolio. He had attended a meeting at the headquarters where he had been briefed on the new national campaign roll-out for Mountain Dew – for the first time with celebrity association. While Mountain Dew had been growing its market share in other regions of the Indian market, the Eastern region had been unresponsive to the mass media image building campaigns. During the meeting, the various aspects of Mountain Dew's performance were discussed and Sanjay was asked to prepare a support plan for the national campaign that will help to increase revenues and market share of the brand in the Eastern region.

To understand the complexities of differential impact of integrated nation-wide communications on various segments of the market due to cultural variations, to understand the role of push strategy vs pull strategy in marketing communications, to understand the role of consistency in image between the trade and consumers perception, to understand the impact of celebrity endorsements, an introduction to the HoE communication models and their applications, to understand limitations of the HoE and Think-Feel-Do models in objective setting and understanding the uses of alternative models, to build a communication plan based on pull vs push strategy.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.