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Board meeting was in full swing as an important announcement had been made by Manish Jain, MD FinMen Advisors Pvt. Ltd. ‘We need to get 5,000 clients by 2023’. Management board members look at each other in wonder as they have only 500 clients in 2018. ‘That's a herculean task’, says a board member, ‘Besides, the clients’ fees are reducing in our business'. Manish interrupts to suggest that it is precisely the reason they want to enhance their client base. But the board members were still not convinced. Their questions revolved around whether they are equipped enough in terms of resources and infrastructure to reach to the number suggested by Manish. There were issues in the processes and systems of the company, there were issues in employees taking onus of leading certain verticals in the company, there were no branding exercise in terms of increasing awareness about the company. On the whole, in order to reach 5,000 clients, a total revamp of processes, systems and training employees needed to be given huge emphasis. But does the company have money for revamping all these issues? ‘I don't care’, says Manish, ‘Any client in any industry looking for credit ratings should be our client’. As Manish moves out of the board room, he says to himself that he was well aware of the facts questioned by the board members. But as a person ready to take up challenge and enjoy the perils of it, Manish was not ready to reconsider any of the points raised by the members. He thought whatever has to be done, has to be done to achieve targets set by him. However, sitting in his office and thinking about the future, Manish was still on the same dilemmic question as any employee in his company: how does he achieve the figure of 5,000 clients by 2023?

The discussion at the conference room in Blue Vector office was vibrant. None of the group members was able to come up to an answer that was consensus in nature about the route that the company would take and the capabilities that they had. The simplest questions asked in the conference room was ‘how would the company be able to take the business forward?’ There were too many options for developing new products and services, but which would be the best for which industry? Which option would make the employees enjoy their work more, while giving them more business and reputation, as well as making them contemporary to the clients? This was the debate which sparked off at 5 p.m. and continued till midnight. The product and services of the company had received huge appreciation globally but Blue Vector seemed to be more ambitious than their competitors. With a registered company in 2017, a strong team and advisors, Piyush kept on harping on the same questions: What's next for us? Are we ready for it?

COCO TANG India is an innovation-driven company. It takes inspiration from the humble coconut water that all of us are very familiar with and have drunk right from our childhood. The founders of the company, Dr Neelima, a dentist by profession and her husband Chaitanya who is a pharmacist have hit upon the idea of a coconut-based drink quite by accident.

When Dr Neelima was pregnant with her first child, the doctor advised her to take fresh coconut water. It was then that Dr Neelima discovered that fresh coconut water was a paradox, the water from a tender coconut is supposed to be fresh but in many cases is not as fresh as it should be. Coconuts are harvested from remote farms in Andhra Pradesh and sent to Hyderabad. And to top it all, the nutrition value of the coconut past its ideal window of consumption leaves a lot to desire. The price factor too is a dampener. It costs Rs. 25 to have tender coconut water in a metropolis like Hyderabad.

Dr Neelima and her husband developed the product idea from their search for a nutritious, healthy drink. Fresh, tender coconut pulp-based shakes, packed with nutrition, taste, health and at the same time make an aspirational product for the young, bubbly and restless youth of India.

This case deals with the problems, the trials and tribulations that these young first-time entrepreneurs faced and details the marketing efforts the young company is putting into survive in the dog eat dog world of fruit drink industry.

The case details the specific marketing-related problems the company faces and examines what the promoters are doing to overcome these problems, specifically related to the four Ps, that is, product, price, place and promotion. It looks in depth at the innovative marketing practices that COCO TANG India is deploying, including the use of the social media that enabled the COCO TANG India’s founder to win Junior Chamber International – Business Excellence Award for the year 2017–2018.

COCO TANG India is also the recipient of the Telugu book of records ‘certificate of national record’ as being the first brand to introduce Tender Coconut-based Mocktails and Milkshakes (A1).

The case pertains to entrepreneurship and the struggles of microentrepreneurs in raising adequate funds. It highlights the insufficiencies in implementation of government’s financing schemes for microenterprises. The case also throws light on the difficulties faced by microentrepreneurs in raising capital through banks and more so if the entrepreneur happens to be a woman. This case revolves around a young woman microentrepreneur, from a humble background, who is determined to expand her orthopaedic-support manufacturing unit. It brings out the enormous difficulties faced by her in obtaining an adequate financing through banks despite many laid out government policies to provide relief and stability to microenterprises. The ardent pursuit and the innovatively designed marketing strategy helped the entrepreneur achieve a reasonable success, in spite of the lack of capital. Her revenue for the financial year 2014–2015 rose to Rs. 9 lakhs/per annum. Her projected revenue for 2015–2016 was Rs. 24 lakhs. The ambitious target seemed difficult if additional funds were not forthcoming. With no help from the banks, the entrepreneur was in a dilemma where to raise the funds from. Her long-term plans for growth would be badly affected.

Social media users can now create, exchange, modify and consume socially generated experiences which can enhance social influence toward mobile banking (MB). This study aims to provide understanding of how social actor interactions through social networking platforms (SNPs) can create social influence for MB adoption and present a research framework that can help to understand which social actors have higher social influence toward MB adoption in conventional and Islamic banks.

SNP users have different levels of perceptions and experiences about the usability and credibility of MB. Therefore, their experiences are subjective realties which can generate socially constructed knowledge. To understand these subjective realties, a social constructivist approach is adopted. Data were collected from interviews with 60 individuals from diverse occupational backgrounds.

Identification element of social influence explained that the shared reviews and recommendations of opinion leaders, industry experts, celebrities and friends were highly positive for conventional banks; therefore, there is high word-of-mouth for MB of conventional banks. Internalization of social influence highlighted that people are more likely to accept the wisdom of the crowd and close friends, which can generate their engagement and connection with MB. Finally, the compliance factor of social influence explained that people can only adopt MB when they perceive high usability and credibility.

This study has provided understanding to the marketers of how social actors on SNPs can play a role in the creation, exchange, modification and consumption of socially generated influence that can impact the MB adoption intention for conventional and Islamic banks.

Although many theories and models have been presented about the marketing strategies and antecedents of MB adoption, the extensive use of SNPs has changed marketing strategies. For example, this study has found that social media users are highly influenced by the social reviews and recommendations they receive from their close friends. Therefore, socially generated influence on SNPs can create an adoption intention toward MB.

Purpose: This paper uses performance theory to explore how wine-tourism experiences are orchestrated by wine tour guides to encourage engagement of consumers. It describes how such orchestration is built on material elements such as landscapes, architecture, vineyards, production facilities, and wine tastings.

Design/methodology/approach: A multi-layer ethnographic research on wine-tourism was employed. The interviews, observations, and field notes were analyzed through the lens of performance theory. A constant comparative method was used to identify emergent patterns, and a hermeneutic method was used to interpret the data.

Findings: The paper builds on performance theory and delineates the ways in which guides co-create intense experiences with participants. It portrays how tour guides often adjust their theatrical scripts to consumers’ unique needs through creative variations: surprise treats, activities, and personal stories. When guides take pleasure in tours, participants do as well, resulting in memorable co-created experiences. The tours feature processes such as pitching and relation-building techniques that call upon identity, morality, and materiality scripts, which ultimately build a sense of social obligation among participants toward tour guides and winery staff.

Originality/value: From a theoretical perspective, the paper adds value to the discussion of performance in tourism by suggesting that the service blueprint, architecture, and employee training are only part of the story. This paper shows how consumer engagement and interactions between participants, guides, architecture, and landscapes are essential elements of memorable experiences.

Research limitations: Like other studies, there are limitations to our study as well. Our study only included one-day wine tours. A broader investigation of strategic alliances between tour companies and wineries, and how wine tourists experience and sustain a sense of social obligations to the wineries they visit, will provide further insights into how wine-tourism functions as a co-creative emergent form of consumption involving individuals, products, and processes.

The existing Nonlinear Dynamic Vibration Absorbers (NLDVAs) have the disadvantages of complex structure, high cost, high installation space requirements and difficulty in miniaturization. And most of the NLDVAs have not been applied to reality. To address the above issues, a novel Triple-magnet Magnetic Dynamic Vibration Absorber (TMDVA) with tunable stiffness, only composed of triple cylindrical permanent magnets and an acrylic tube, is designed, modeled and tested in this paper.

(1) A novel TMDVA is designed. (2) Theoretical and experimental methods. (3) Equivalent dynamics model.

It is found that adjusting the magnet distance can effectively optimize the vibration reduction effect of the TMDVA under different resonance conditions. When the resonance frequency of the cantilever changes, the magnet distance of the TMDVA with a high vibration reduction effect shows an approximately linear relationship with the resonance frequency of the cantilever which is convenient for the design optimization of the TMDVA.

Both the simulation and experimental results prove that the TMDVA can effectively reduce the vibration of the cantilever even if the resonance frequency of the cantilever changes, which shows the strong robustness of the TMDVA. Given all that, the TMDVA has potential application value in the passive vibration reduction of engineering structures.