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This case illustrates the differences between customers and the occasions when conditions change and buyer-seller relationships fail. The key issue is to find ways to anticipate this problem with other clients.

It may be used in second-year courses of MBA marketing programs as well as in specific executive education programs dealing with key account management (KAM) systems, business strategy, industrial marketing and/or sales management courses. This case can also be used at undergraduate programs and courses dealing with sales, sales management, international business, and organizational behavior.

In 2003, after Carlos Etcheverry joined San Antonio (SA) as Latin American Region Vice President, the company implanted a KAM System. SA's relationships with its two key clients, Vintage and Chevron, seemed to progress nicely until mid 2004, when Chevron's newly hired Purchasing Manager decided to change the company's commercial structure, rendering its purchasing process more bureaucratic and extremely competitive. In March 2005, Etcheverry was to meet Chevron's purchasing manager, since Chevron had decided to reassign a service contract through a new invitation to bid, leaving San Antonio out. The case puts forth the questions faced by Etcheverry at the time of the meeting: How had San Antonio come to jeopardize a key account? Would SA's organization need a change? Was this the only solution available? What other factors should be considered?

This case may help students to: understand the complexity of key account management (KAM) system implementation, sales force concepts and business-to-business relationships; and analyze the difficulties faced by companies upon implementing a change in their sales strategies and the effects of this change on the sales force, corporate culture and the organization as a whole management system.

Teaching notes and a Technical note are available; also access to audio visual support with an interview to Carlos Etcheverry.

The area of focus is on internationalization strategies, specifically on developing suitable strategies to support an internationalization initiative of a new medical device company.

This case is designed for final year undergraduate and MBA students. It is suitable for courses of organizational management, organization theory and design, strategic management, and international business as well as international marketing.

GranuLab, a medical device company that produced the synthetic bone graft substitute GranuMaS, aspired to be a high-growth company. To achieve this aspiration the company had made plans for internationalization, which include penetrating the ASEAN, Middle East, Latin American, and African markets within the next five years. By December 2010, GranuLab had completed the construction of its new manufacturing facility in Shah Alam, about 30km from Malaysia's capital city of Kuala Lumpur. This manufacturing facility had the capability to produce high volumes to support the company's high growth plan. However, the company's internationalization processes had taken longer than expected and this has led to a low business volume. By mid-2012, the company was forced to make a quick decision as it had suffered a year and a half of operations losses. GranuLab had to formulate a strategy as to how to position GranuMaS and penetrate the targeted markets. Failure to internationalize would incur even greater losses and might hinder the achievement of its high growth aspiration by 2015.

This case is designed to stimulate case analysts' thinking into providing recommendations for the appropriate internationalization strategies to be adopted by the management team to ensure that the company could succeed in achieving its goals. The case will expose students to the concepts and theories of strategic management, international business, international entrepreneurship; and facilitate the development of students' abilities to apply those concepts in managerial situations.

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

Developing and communicating a positioning strategy covering issues on market positioning, product lifecycle, product differentiation strategies and developing the marketing mix strategies in order to compete with competitors.

Advanced undergraduate and MBA student, taking courses of marketing management, strategic marketing, and brand management.

GranuLab is a private limited company based in Shah Alam, about 30 km from Malaysia's capital city of Kuala Lumpur; it was a producer of synthetic bone graft substitute GranuMaS. GranuMaS was launched in the Malaysian market in late 2010. At that time, the company aimed to capture 50-70 percent of the Malaysian bone graft substitute market by the end of 2015. However, by the end of 2012, GranuLab was experiencing low sales and the company had suffered a two-year loss due to manufacturing at low capacity. GranuLab also faced stiff competition from multinational competitors that had penetrated the Malaysian market earlier with competitive product offerings. The pressure to increase the sale ofGranuMaS was mounting for Mr Romli Ishak, the Managing Director of GranuLab, Mr Fadil Dalal, the new General Manager of Marketing, and GranuLab's management team. This is especially so since the company's contract to supply GranuMaS to government hospitals under the Ministry of Health (MOH) program would end soon. These situations forced the company to make a quick decision. In December 2012, Mr Romli and his team pondered upon the best strategy that the company should pursue to achieve its objective of being a dominant player in the Malaysian bone graft substitute industry. This teaching case is designed to stimulate case analysts' thinking on positioning a medical device product in a market which was already conquered by established multinational companies.

Understanding of the concept of product positioning, product lifecycle, marketing mix strategies, and social exchange theory, enables case analysts to extend the concepts to analyzing many other products and services in organizational settings.

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

The case is aimed at pointing out the basic nuances of entrepreneurship without a profit motive and the challenges faced in the course of achieving the same.

This case could be a part of the Entrepreneurship course in a Post-Graduate Program in Business Management. In case of an Executive Education Program, this case can be used to facilitate issues in Entrepreneurship Development and Non-Profit Marketing.

The present case is a field-based illustrative study on Xplant, a unit set up by Xavier Research Foundation to promote production and selling of seasonal and ornamental plants with accessories to prospective buyers. The uniqueness about the organization was that it was solely governed and run by the students of Biotechnology Course at Xaviers College, Ahmedabad, India. However, in early 2012, it was found that the organization was facing a lot of issues such as competition, lesser demand and lack of motivation of the employees (students). All of which were taking the unit away from achieving sustainability.

Understanding the basics of a new venture and entrepreneurship; understanding the role of the team members in promoting the entrepreneurship venture; role of leadership in entrepreneurship; impact of independence of the entrepreneur and transference of business vision on long-term success of the venture; role of environment in success/failure or entrepreneurial ventures; and problems faced by entrepreneurship ventures.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email subhadip.roy@iimu.ac.in to request teaching notes.

The learning outcomes of this paper is as follows: to analyse the drivers, mediators and threats of commoditisation. To critically evaluate the merits of different marketing options that may be employed to avoid commoditisation. To critically assess the branding-focussed or customer-focussed strategies that could be used. To develop appropriate strategies for Biotronik SA to counter commoditisation in the future.

The case begins with the protagonist and managing director of Biotronik SA, Robbie Nel, brewing over a new industry development. One of the leading private hospital groups has sent an open invitation to medical device suppliers to tender, where the lowest-priced products will win shelf space in their cathlabs. Robbie has to decide whether to sacrifice Biotronik SA’s profit margins to win the tender or risk not being stocked in their cathlabs. Or, he must find an alternative non-price-based strategy to pursue. The medical device industry is facing increasing price pressures from various stakeholders in the device-purchasing process. The decision to purchase is no longer the responsibility of specialist physicians alone. International and local market trends indicate that the medical device industry is threatened by commoditisation. Robbie has to make a decision on changing the Biotronik SA business model and strategy in response to these macro trends.

This teaching case is aimed at postgraduate students, particularly those pursuing MBA, EMBA and Postgraduate Diploma programmes, as well as specialist masters and executive education. The students should have some work experience to comprehend and assess the case from a practical perspective.

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 8: Marketing.

This case is based on primary and secondary sources of information. These sources include interviews with senior executives as well as documents provided by Mondragon and Eroski. The interviews were conducted on-site. In addition, the authors researched the literature on both organizations.

Eroski is the largest of Mondragon Corporation’s coops. Since its founding, Eroski has faced numerous challenges. It has responded to each challenge with out-of-the-box thinking. In response to the pandemic, Eroski become an e-commerce supermarket as well as selectively continuing bricks and mortar stores. As the pandemic is winding down, Eroski is considering how to respond to the “new normal,” which is largely undefined. The question posited at the end of the case is, “Will Eroski be able to hold to its social principles, maintain its unusual governance model and other unusual practices, and survive this latest challenge?”

Eroski of Mondragon is a complex and unusual organization. To appreciate the challenges and how they were overcome by its unique business model, a student must have a minimum background in management, corporate finance and marketing. Thus, this case would fit well into a senior or graduate class on strategic human resource management. It is also recommended for the strategy capstone course usually offered during the last year of a business bachelor’s degree (senior level) to ensure that students are introduced to what Paul Adler refers to as an alternative business model. It can also be targeted for an advanced management course or a strategy course at the MBA and executive levels.

The teaching objectives of the case study will enable the students as follows: to recognise the challenges of information technology (IT) implementation in the health-care sector associated with employee resistance, to apply the technology acceptance model for analysing the degree of employee resistance, to relate the utilisation of Kotter’s 8-step change management approach in successful IT implementation in the health-care sector and maintenance of employee productivity and to classify the leadership traits reflected by the leaders in training the 600 diverse employee population of Al-Ain hospital.

The case highlighted the predicament the government-owned Al-Ain City Hospital, United Arab Emirates, faced following the surge in the incidences of COVID-19 in the country in March 2020. The hospital management decided to initiate the work-from-home arrangement as a non-pharmaceutical intervention of handling the spread of the disease amongst its employees. Fatima Almur, the Information Technology Director in Al-Ain Hospital, asked the Application Support Manager, Aysha Shahwan, to deploy some IT tools significant for remote support to patient care within two weeks. Shahwan faced significant challenges in deploying the IT tools in two weeks given the diverse workforce, with the majority of them having limited knowledge in operating the tools, and hence, their apprehension in the usefulness of the tools. Besides, Shahwan had to deploy some advanced tools for easy and secured access to the electronic health record, telemedicine and telecommuting using mobile phones, tablets or PCs. The deployment of these advanced tools would be jeopardised by employee acceptance and consequent dwindling productivity. Considering the issue of employee acceptance of the change and their limited knowledge, Shahwan had, therefore, to develop training frameworks to boost the former’s perceived usefulness and ease-of-use of the IT tools. Will Shahwan successfully deploy the advanced IT tools to enable the hospital staff, including medical staff and departments, to ensure efficient patient care from a remote location? Will she be able to train the 600 employees across genders, ages and knowledge, use the IT tools and safeguard them from common software threats like email phishing and ransomware? Will the hospital be able to sustain its vision of quality patient care using advanced technologies through this new arrangement of remote support amidst the pandemic when patients are more?

Undergraduate business management.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 10: Public sector management.

This case discusses the best-selling security system for preventing shoplifting and the dilemma its startup manufacturer faced when it learned there was a very remote possibility that the system might interfere with heart pacemakers. The theme of the case is that when health is involved, a company must carefully consider any level of preventable risk a product poses, even if that level of risk is extremely low.

A Confrontation of Mindsets: French Retailers Operating in Poland traces the history of French retailers setting up operations in Poland in the mid 90s. The case, however, is set in 2006 when a top retailing executive recalls the important watershed period of 1996-97 when the expatriate managers in charge of setting up the first hypermarkets encountered great difficulties with their new Polish recruits. The managers were not succeeding in transferring the practices and routines that were an essential part of their business model on the home market in France: their Polish employees displayed work attitudes that were the contrary of the initiative and responsibility for enlarged jobs that characterized employees back home. This situation called into question the very viability of their business model in Poland. The case poses very clearly the question of what actions the expatriate managers should decide to take to ensure the store launchings in Poland and future growth. The issues raised concern global versus multi-domestic internationalization strategies, business models, paradigms, corporate culture, management of expats, knowledge transfer and the link between strategic implementation and organizational behavior.

After working through the case and the assignment questions, students will be able to understand the current practices and importance of influencer marketing strategies within overall marketing strategies; appreciate both the debate and dissonance that surround influencer performance measures; outline the key elements of Qoruz.com’s investments and efforts that brought them success; understand the strategic intent and justify the logic of operationalisation of Qoruz.com by creating two different SBUs after they launched a vastly improved tech platform; and evaluate potential strategies that Qoruz.com could use to move ahead and cement its supremacy in the influencer marketing space.

Interest in influencer marketing which found many takers during the pandemic was expected to intensify and form the core of many brand strategies. Coupled with this heightened interest and increased budget overlay, demands from brands and agencies alike for clearer ROI linkages and KPIs that have better correlation with business goals, have gained momentum. Qoruz, an early entrant in the influencer marketing space in India, attributed their success to their focus on product innovation and service quality. From a predominantly narrow service offering providing analytics that facilitated decision-making for influencer marketing campaigns, their recently launched multi-feature platform enabled them to expand their services and consolidate their position. However, today, in an increasing volatile market, drawn by the high growth trajectory of the influencer marketing space, many players had jumped in and tried to introduce technology-based platforms with almost similar features while aggressively playing the price card. With the monetary and economic conditions under pressure and constantly changing demands of clients, Qoruz.com found itself faced with a dilemma to protect their first mover advantage. The co-founders of Qoruz realised that to give confidence to their loyal client base, and really cement their leadership, they would need to urgently take stock and relook at their strategy afresh relying on their deep experience of the industry, loyalty of their customers and their tech-centric DNA to build a holistic and ambitious strategy.

This case is designed for use by graduate and under-graduate level students in marketing management and strategic management courses.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.