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The case study has several objectives: to gauge the evaluation of the direct-to-consumer industry in the economy of India, to analyse the competition of the brands, to ascertain the evolution of smaller direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands on the purchasing capacity of consumers, to analyse challenges in branding in Tier 2 and 3 cities and to evaluate the strategic branding decisions of Mamaearth.

During her pregnancy, Ghazal Alagh and her husband Varun Alagh, the co-founders of Mamaearth, were looking for some good and natural products for their baby’s skincare. However, she could not find products that were 100% safe. Hence, as a concerned mother, she started using a few hands-on home remedies for her baby, which were 100% organic, and then the idea clicked to her to start a baby care brand named Mamaearth, which later also included personal care products. The company started as a DTC/internet-first brand in 2016, which only used to sell products online without any intermediaries when it was still trying to make its way in the market and was aware of the stiff competition by giants such as Hindustan Unilever and Proctor & Gamble, who were ruling the market for decades. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the market saw a shift in consumer buying patterns. There was greater use of e-commerce touch points for shopping, as various digital platforms such as the official site of products, social media and mobile platforms were used by consumers during the pandemic, leading to digitalization in buying and digitalization of consumer shopping journey. These technology platforms were expected to play a substantial role in reaching and creating consumer awareness, transaction and retention post-COVID according to reports by Deloitte 2020. Moreover, such a shift in behaviour amidst the COVID-19 pandemic shot up sales of this DTC brand and made itself the big shot it is today, where they were looking to get into an initial public offering in just seven years of its launch. They re-evaluated their strategy, which helped them become the biggest brand in no time.

This case study is suitable for Doctor of Philosophy students.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

We enquire whether short-time work (STW) avoids firings as intended by policymakers and is associated with unintended side effects by subsidising some establishments and locking in some employees. Additionally, where it was feasible, establishments used working from home (WFH) to continue working without risking an increase in COVID-19 infections and allowing employed parents to care for children attending closed schools.

Using 21 waves of German high-frequency establishment panel data collected during the COVID-19 crisis, we investigate how STW and WFH are associated with hirings, firings, resignations and excess labour turnover (or churning).

Our results show the important influences of STW and working from home on employment dynamics during the pandemic. By means of STW, establishments are able to avoid an increase in involuntary layoffs and hiring decreases significantly. In contrast, WFH is associated with a rise in resignations, as can be expected from a theoretical perspective.

While most of the literature on STW and WFH is unrelated and remains descriptive, we consider them in conjunction and conduct panel data analyses. We apply data and methods that allow for the dynamic pattern of STW and working from home during the pandemic. Furthermore, our data include relevant establishment-level variables, such as the existence of a works council, employee qualifications, establishment size, the degree to which the establishment was affected by the COVID-19 crisis, industry affiliation and a wave indicator for the period the survey was conducted.

Many brands claim they were born by coincidence, yet the effects and contingencies of this communication strategy are little understood by extant marketing research on unexpected events. This study aims to investigate how consumers react to brand communications portraying a coincidental vs planned origin.

This research presents five experimental studies embedding coincidental brand origins into different types of marketing communications (i.e. crowdfunding campaigns, visual ads and brand biographies).

This research finds that coincidental brand origins increase persuasion (measured as money pledged to a crowdfunding campaign, overall brand equity and purchase intention) but only for consumers high in need for cognition (NFC). This effect is mediated by processing enjoyment, as the intrinsic need for thinking that characterizes high NFC consumers is satisfied by the opportunity to process the coincidence. Further to process, the authors show that explicitly providing an explanation for the coincidence makes the effect disappear, as this deprives high-NFC consumers of the opportunity to autonomously engage in and enjoy the cognitive process.

Brand managers able to leverage coincidences in their storytelling efforts should target high-NFC consumers and should not provide an explanation for the coincidences.

This research advances the limited literature on how consumers react to coincidences in a marketing context, the understanding of how brand communication strategies persuade consumers through information processing and the NFC literature.

This study aims to examine the role of returnee managers that can affect the strategic-divestment decision of emerging-market firms (EM firms). Drawing on arguments from the upper echelons theory and international human resource mobility perspectives, this study aims to propose that returnee managers influence corporate divestitures when the business outlook is negative. In addition, this study aims to examine the interplay between returnee managers and CEOs, whose characteristics can foster or undermine the efforts of returnee managers to engage in corporate divestments.

This study examines 278 firms from nine emerging economies. The negative binomial regression was employed to estimate the model. In the robustness checks, the logistic regression was adopted to confirm the earlier findings.

The empirical results support the notion that returnee managers strengthen the relationship between firm performance and divestments. Because of the limited liabilities of foreignness and outsidership, returnee managers can gain social trust and credibility through communication and social interaction. Furthermore, the results provide mixed support for the moderating effect of CEO characteristics on the performance–divestment relationship.

This study reveals that returnee managers are a great asset for EM firms that aim to find synergies and upgrade their capabilities through asset reconfiguration, which is an essential activity of emerging market firms to integrate themselves into the global competition. Meanwhile, CEO characteristics can foster (through their education level) or hinder (due to their age) divestment attempts, influenced by returnee managers.

This study explores an understudied phenomenon in international business (IB): strategic divestment of EM firms. The literature that examines strategic divestment and corporate refocusing in emerging markets is extremely limited. Furthermore, this study explores the novel topic that intersects the international business (IB) and international human resource management (IHRM) research areas. Specifically, this study investigates the impact of returnee managers on strategic divestments.

The purpose of this study is to understand the effect of different brand positions (underdog vs top dog) and comparative advertising on consumers’ brand attitudes. Additionally, this study also aims to demonstrate the effects of inspiration, self-relevance and empathy on the relationship between brand positioning and comparative advertising.

A two-by-three factorial design was employed with brand positions (underdog vs top dog) and three types of comparative advertising (noncomparative, indirect comparative and direct comparative) as the independent variables. Inspiration serves as the mediator, while self-relevance and empathy act as moderators and brand attitude is the dependent variable.

The results show that different brand positions significantly affect brand attitudes, with respondents having a better brand attitude toward the underdog brand. Brand attitude is partially mediated by inspiration. Self-relevance moderates the relationship between brand positioning and brand attitude. However, brand positioning, comparative advertising and empathy do not have interaction effects.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the effect of psychological variables on brand positioning and comparative advertising.

The results suggest that the underdog setting requires a real and honest story because consumers will spot a fake underdog story, which will damage consumer trust in the brand and harm the brand image.

There is a lack of research using psychological variables to demonstrate the effect of being the underdog brand. This study contributes to the literature by employing psychological variables to illustrate the effect of underdog positioning. These findings can help brands develop branding positioning strategies.

This paper aims to investigate how and when visual referents in brand visual aesthetics (i.e. colours, shapes, patterns and materials) serve as design applications that enable consumer diasporic identity.

This paper uses an innovative methodology that triangulates 58 in-depth interviews with diasporic consumers, 9 interviews with brand managers and designers and a visual analysis of brands (food retailer, spices and nuts, skincare, hair and cosmetics, ice cream and wine) to provide a view of the phenomenon from multiple perspectives.

This study illustrates how and when particular applications and compositions of product and design referents support diasporic identity for Middle Eastern consumers living outside the Middle East. Specifically, it illustrates how the design applications of harmonising (applying separate ancestral homeland and culture of living product and design referents simultaneously), homaging (departing from the culture of living product and design referents with a subtle tribute to ancestral homeland culture) and heritaging (departing from the ancestral homeland culture product and design referents with slight updates to a culture of living style) can enable diasporic identity in particular social situations.

Although applied to the Middle Eastern diaspora, this research opens up interesting avenues for future research that assesses diasporic consumers’ responses to brands seeking to use visual design to engage with this market. Moreover, future research should explore these design applications in relation to issues of cultural appreciation and appropriation.

The hybrid design compositions identified in this study can provide brand managers with practical tools for navigating the design process when targeting a diasporic segment. The design applications and their consequences are discussed while visually demonstrating how they can be crafted.

While previous research mainly focused on how consumption from the ancestral homeland occurred, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine how hybrid design compositions that combine a diaspora’s ancestral homeland culture and their culture of living simultaneously and to varying degrees resonate with diasporic consumers.

The purposes of this paper are to delve into the “liability of foreignness” among immigrants and to explore factors that may enhance or moderate such liability while obtaining jobs in host countries. We explore the competition for jobs in a host country among foreign-born individuals from various backgrounds and local residents, by examining such factors as their human capital, as well as, for the foreign-born, their duration of residence in the host country.

Applying configurational theorizing, we propose that the presence of specific human capital can help reduce the challenges associated with the “liability of foreignness” for migrants who have shorter durations of stay in the host country, and, to a lesser extent, for female migrants. Our study draws upon extensive career data spanning several decades and involving 249 employees within a Danish multinational enterprise.

We find that specific human capital helps established immigrants in general, although female immigrants are more vulnerable. We furthermore find a strong “gender liability” in the industry even for local females, including returnees in the host countries. Our findings suggest that for immigrants, including returnees, career building requires a mix of right human capital and tenure in the host country, and that career building is especially challenging for female immigrants.

While the concept of “liability of foreignness” – focussing on discrimination faced by immigrants in the labour market – has been brought to the fore, a notable gap exists in empirical research pertaining to studies aiming at disentangling potential means to overcome such liability, as well as in studies seeking to explore this issue from a stance of gendered experience.

The principal objective of this current research is to explore and test an underlying mechanism to solve the inconsistent relationship between supervisors’ developmental feedback and employee creativity. This study also tests the moderating role of absorptive capacity in fully understanding the relationship between two constructs.

A time-lagged survey was utilized to collect data from 317 employees working at information technology (IT) organizations in Vietnam. This research conducted a hierarchical regression analysis to examine the hypotheses.

This research found that employees’ operational skills fully mediated the link between supervisors’ developmental feedback and employees’ creative performance. Moreover, absorptive capacity positively moderated the relationship between supervisors’ developmental feedback and employees’ operational skills as well as the relationship between employees’ operational skills and employee creativity.

This research is one of the first papers to discuss the mediating role of employees’ operational skills in associating supervisors’ developmental feedback with employee creativity in response to the calls of previous studies. To fully comprehend the indirect impact of supervisors' developmental feedback on workers' creative performance, this research also examines the moderating influence of absorptive capacity at the individual level.

The current research aims to analyze the literature to determine its strengths and weaknesses and extract the required information, which will be used to identify the characteristics of the highly competitive organization (HCO), define it and identify the HCO's critical success factors (CSFs). Finally, the future research agenda will be proposed.

A multiple stages research methodology was used to fulfill the research objectives. The research started with the systematic literature review (SLR). Then, focus group discussions and Pareto analysis were used to fulfill research objectives.

Eleven points were identified in the research to represent the characteristics of the HCO. Then, the HCO was defined based on the elements of these points. Moreover, the vital few CSFs to successfully implement many research scopes were identified. Then, the CSFs of the HCO was generated based on these vital few CSFs.

The main limitation of the current research is the literature sample size. A larger sample selection could enrich the generated lists with many other CSFs.

Many implications points were highlighted in this research which showed the importance of the current research for academic and practical audiences.

The SLR process showed that the reviewed literature lacked a consolidated list of the HCO characteristics and a clear definition of the HCO. Moreover, the reviewed literature lacked a unified list of the HCO CSFs. Therefore, the current research approach is novel and original.