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This case focuses on Cisco Systems' innovative probe-and-learn approach to using social media to launch its ASR 1000 Series Edge Router. The company had decided to eschew traditional print and TV media in marketing the new product and had decided instead to focus its efforts entirely on digital marketing and social media to attract the attention of its target market. The case discusses Cisco's bold plan to launch the ASR 1000 Series “virtually, visually, and virally” and the digital tactics employed by the Cisco Systems marketing team to accomplish this ambitious goal. Business marketers normally adopt a more serious and traditional approach to marketing its products but in this case Cisco had decided to buck that trend by exploring digital tools and social gaming avenues which its target client—the technical community—were increasingly frequenting. Cisco's challenge lay in whether this new approach and resultant value proposition would resonate with its technical audience and give the ASR 1000 Router the kind of publicity it needed to have. The case is set at a time when social media was burgeoning as a promising way to engage consumers more deeply with brands and products, but marketers were still experimenting with the tools and tactics of social media for marketing.

Understand the relevance of social media for product launches as a function of contextual factors such as nature of product, media habits, and company credibility. Learn about the applicability of social media for business marketers in terms of its uniqueness, advantages and challenges. Recognize the relationship between campaign objectives and the value proposition for the product. Understand the evolution of social media marketing from a probe-and-learn approach to a strategy-driven process. The initial test and learn approach must be enhanced and become more strategic in the future.

The case can be used at undergraduate and postgraduate level, in management development programmes or in Executive Education programmes.

Social entrepreneurship, social inclusion, business model innovation, sustainability, strategy design and strategy execution.

The case explores the development of MITTI Café, an organisation that trains and employs individuals with intellectual, physical and/or psychiatric disabilities to work in inclusive kitchens and cafes in India. The protagonist is the founder of the café, Alina Alam, who has won several international awards for her work. The case highlights Alam’s approach and how she is trying to challenge societal and business perspectives relating to disability. From 2017 to 2021, Alam has scaled and operationalised the business, building her core team, leveraging several partnerships with stakeholders and putting into place offerings, processes and procedures that created a sustainable business model and blueprint.MITTI Café aligns itself with several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with sustainability and social impact at the core of its strategy. As Alam considers the future in July 2021, what else needs to be taken into consideration to scale either within India or abroad?

Following reading and exploring the case, students should be able to identify how social exclusion and inclusion manifests in a business context, and how social entrepreneurship ventures such as MITTI Café can address this challenge; identify capabilities in the context of people with disabilities; recognise how stakeholder relationships can be leveraged as a force for good and for growth, and address SDGs through social enterprise; identify and categorise resources and capabilities within organisations; evaluate opportunities for growth and scale.

The case explores how the protagonist is challenging the concept of “ability” and through her work with the differently abled providing scalable opportunities for social inclusion and dignity.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

Students learn to evaluate a firm’s growth strategies with the aim of establishing long-term business sustainability. Students will examine the impact of external macro-environmental factors that influence firm growth in an emerging market context. Using this case, students will learn how to apply a resource-based view to a firm’s offering by comparing and identifying the competitive advantage of the internal resources of the firm. Using this case, students can apply the principle of strategic fit by strategically analyzing the opportunities and threats in the external environment, while taking into account the firm’s internal strengths and weaknesses.

This case outlines the strategic, macro-environmental and marketing challenges that the Cape Town-based private higher education institution, Red & Yellow Creative School of Business, faced as it entered its 25th year of existence. In 2019, Red & Yellow had its roots in industry and had done well historically to cement that bond through the creation of successful alumni and the constant innovation of its higher education offering. Two weeks before having to present a detailed five-year growth strategy plan to the board of directors, Rob Stokes, the Director and Chairman of Red & Yellow, was faced with a multitude of decisions pertaining to the sustainable growth of the school. Recent growth patterns showed that programs with lower profit margins, such as classroom-based full-time programs, had experienced double-digit growth while student numbers for higher gross profit offerings, such as online and executive education programs had started to decline. Another challenge that the school faced was the need for its students to future-proof their careers in a world where artificial intelligence and machine learning threatened their careers and jobs. As such, Red & Yellow was confronted with one central strategic problem: How to grow strategically in the short term while developing a sustainable and scalable growth strategy for the school in the long term.

This case could work well as part of an executive education course, as well as a strategic management course for master’s degree or Master of Business Administration students.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

This case presents some of the entrepreneurial challenges faced by a female leader in the technology sector who conceived a new product based on her passion to help others especially those most disadvantaged.

Upon completion of this case study, students should be able to prepare supply chain and distribution analysis that considers ethics and sustainability, integrate philanthropic efforts as part of an organizational strategy and recognize strategies to promote equity within and beyond an organization.

Connie Stacey (she/her) is an entrepreneur and president of Growing Greener Innovations, an award-winning battery energy storage company based in Alberta, Canada, with a mission to end energy poverty globally. With the emergence of COVID-19 as a global pandemic in 2020, Stacey turned her attention to an innovation called Project Rescue, a ventilator that uses non-identifying patient vitals to track data. It serves as a pandemic early warning system, addressing two key challenges: pandemic data are prone to error, and real-time information is non-existent after the pandemic has spread. This new product was conceived based on her passion to help others, especially those most disadvantaged. This multi-faceted case focuses on the many challenges that Stacey and her team needed to address. The dilemma in this case centres on establishing supply chains amid a pandemic, as well as prioritizing the corporate social responsibility elements of philanthropy and equity within her organization (and beyond).

This case is appropriate for third- or fourth-year undergraduate or graduate-level students.

In addition to “call out boxes” throughout the case and teaching note, additional readings/links/videos are outlined below. (These supplementary materials, “Teaching Tips”, are included in the teaching notes as well.)

CCS 11: Strategy.

In late 2019, Dr. Hiroaki Kitano, the president and director of research at Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL), had decided he would be stepping down from his position soon. Sony CSL, a small blue-sky fundamental research facility funded by Sony, had always operated on the strength of the trust between Sony's CEO and the lab's director. Sony had been hands-off in its management, leaving Kitano to hire, fire, fund, and evaluate the lab's researchers and project portfolio at his own discretion. Now that he was stepping down, however, he worried that Sony CSL could not withstand his departure. Kitano wanted to make a transparent plan for the organization's future before he handed off Sony CSL to his successor. That plan involved three key decisions. First, what should be the optimal structure and governance of Sony CSL? Should it maintain its independence and autonomy, or should it align more closely with Sony's business priorities? Second, how could Sony CSL scale its impact on Sony and society at large, given its small size? Finally, should Sony CSL establish some standard methods of measuring project success and strength of the portfolio? In making these decisions, Kitano wanted to ensure that he preserved the unique culture that had allowed Sony CSL to pursue path-breaking research and innovation.

This case study focuses on social entrepreneurship in emerging markets, looking at what is social entrepreneurship, theories of market failure, opportunity generation through effectuation, social franchising and funding.

Students of social entrepreneurship, development studies, sustainable livelihoods and asset-based development. It is useful for customised or short programmes or for students with a background in business (e.g. Diploma in Business Administration/MBA/custom programmes) wanting to understand social enterprise and blended theories of social and economic change.

The case tells the story of Unjani container clinics which are providing affordable, quality access to people who struggle to access South Africa’s crumbling public health system. Dr Iain Barton recognised the role that nurses can play to relieve pressure on the system, by providing primary healthcare. He piloted Unjani using shipping containers as clinics with support from his company, Imperial Health Sciences. The story of Unjani is therefore one of startup and sustainable growth, partnership and building independent, self-sustaining social enterprises in a franchising system. The theory explored includes the importance of context, the role of market failure in spotting opportunity, developing opportunity through effectuation, defining social entrepreneurship and funding and growing the organisation.

The teaching objectives are framed by Mair (2010) who finds that where social entrepreneurs operate affects what they do and how they do it. Objective 1: Explores the influence of context on social entrepreneurship helping students frame a definition of social entrepreneurship. Objective 2: Students are able to connect the theory of market failure to opportunity identification and effectuation for social entrepreneurs. Objective 3: Students apply the definition of social entrepreneurship based on Santos’ (2010) Positive Theory. Objective 4: Students will be able to apply knowledge of social franchising models, as an approach to scaling. Objective 5: Students understand the principles of resource dependency theory and are able to use the funding spectrum as a tool to identify funding types.

Links to two videos are provided in the case. Recommendations are also made for materials to be used in the class, e.g. Global Competitiveness Index and Gapminder World, which are excellent tools to demonstrate the social and economic growth divide.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

The case study will encourage reflection on the challenges that organisations face in attracting, engaging and retaining knowledge workers that are critical to their performance and growth. It is set in the context of innovative, high-tech organisations whose success is heavily dependent on the performance of information technology (IT) professionals, a specialised and heavily demanded workforce.

The case study depicts the struggle of Manoel Almeida, Descomplica’s chief technology officer, to reverse the scenario of demotivation and high turnover among IT employees and to attract new talent. The case study addresses the themes of knowledge worker attraction, engagement and retention, with a focus on IT professionals.

This case study is designed for undergraduate and graduate education programmes/courses.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 7: Management science.

Entrepreneurship, finance, technology and innovation, general management.

This case is suitable for students in finance, entrepreneurship and general management. The case seeks to understand the challenges of funding in technology startups and how they vary from product to service areas.

Availability of capital, short term and long term, is a major constraint faced by entrepreneurs. In India, in the technology sector, services companies have been able to innovate and grow whereas product-based companies that survived the challenges of funding have been scarce. Aluru Karthik Prasanth is presented in the case as a young entrepreneur with passion and drive to pursue the commercialization of an idea he developed during his undergraduate studies in engineering. Leaving behind the beaten paths ofMTech and employment, he decides to pursue MS entrepreneurship at IIT Madras. As he starts with his program, he analyses the challenges faced by previous technology start ups, Karthik has a dilemma – deciding whether to follow a product idea or change his plans to a technology service.

A detailed analysis of the case would help students address the following questions in entrepreneurial decision making: should an entrepreneur in technology in India pursue a product idea or service idea?. What are the pros and cons of each choice in financing? How can an entrepreneur pursue a product idea and minimize his/her risks? How does an entrepreneur's personal attributes influence his/her course? (e.g. family background, need for control) What are the challenges and opportunities in each kind of funding: debt, venture, angel, etc. in the Indian context?

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

This paper aims to understand the changing landscape of media and entertainment industry, to understand the difference between display advertising and native advertising, to know the standing of BuzzFeed in the industry and to know the strategic actions of BuzzFeed under the current competitive business environment.

Founded in 2006 as a viral lab, by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson, with the aim of tracking viral content, it caused disruption in the market with its entry and grew very rapidly. It was valued at $1.5bn in 2015, having raised money from numerous investors. The revenue of BuzzFeed was driven by the concept of native advertising. Catchy headlined articles conveyed the sense that BuzzFeed might be charging advertisers on basis of clicks, but this was not entirely true. Instead, BuzzFeed charged a fee from its clients for creating custom content targeting the customer base of the client. However, the year 2015 went tough for BuzzFeed when, as per the reports by Financial Times, it fell short of achieving its targeted revenue of US$250m by US$80m. It forced the company to revise and lower its target revenues for the year 2016 as well. The combined worldwide traffic to BuzzFeed saw a decline of up to 14 per cent. As Claire marketing head looked out of the window and pondered over the slashed revenue projections and the content related issues, the question on her mind was would native advertising sustain BuzzFeed in the longer run? BuzzFeed was known for its viral content and native advertising would involve finding a balance between what is good for the advertisers' brand and what will become viral. Buzzfeed ran a risk of losing brands to other modes of advertisement if they felt that native advertisement, which disguises the product within the content, was not meeting their expectations.

The case is targeted at students of post-graduation and under-graduation programs in Business Administration.

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

Marketing

The learning objectives of this case study are to understand business-to-business (B2B) marketing in a logistics organization; apply go-to-market (GTM) strategy in the logistics industry; design B2B distribution strategy so as to enhance geographic penetration; and develop digital marketing strategies in the logistics industry.

V-Xpress is a leading B2B player in the express cargo category in the Indian logistics industry. In March 2017, Sachin Nair, Head of V-Xpress Marketing, was presenting three different GTM strategies to the CEO for the new Assured Timely Movement services. He wanted CEO views on each of them so that he can choose the best one. Sachin was also trying to find a solution to backhaul problem in eastern India. The resolution of this problem would have helped V-Xpress to become a truly pan-India B2B logistics company. Sachin was also revamping the digital marketing strategy as part of ambitious V-Xpress marketing strategy. These initiatives were taken as part of CEO’s vision for reaching annual revenue of INR 10bn by 2020. Sachin was thinking about various options so as to implement these changes with least investments.

This case study can be used in B2B marketing, marketing management and marketing strategy course of an MBA program.

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