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Describes the history of the tobacco industry and its emergence as an extremely effective marketer and non-market strategist. After years of success, both publicly and politically, the leaders of the tobacco industry are faced with mounting political pressure and the financial threat of litigation from class-action lawsuits. The leaders face an industry-wide strategic decision of whether to acquiesce to government demands in exchange for immunity, focus on judicial success, or develop a new course of action.

To evaluate the formulation and implementation of non-market strategies in the context of regulatory, legislative, and legal institutions. To understand how various aspects of the non-market environment interact and how these environments not only change over time, but change market competition within an industry. Further, to formulate and decide between firm-specific and industry-wide strategies. Finally, to appreciate and reflect upon the potential conflict between non-market strategies and ethical concerns.

You are the CEO of an e-cigarette company that has just been acquired by a major tobacco company. Your company operates in the European market. The July 2013 draft of the EU Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) recently has been crafted by the European Commission, but it has not yet been examined by the EU Parliament and its Council. The draft proposes that all e-cigarette products be classified as medical devices, regardless of nicotine content. This is the strictest available mode of regulation. If the directive goes into effect as written, e-cigarettes would have to undergo costly and lengthy clinical trials to receive approval and face much stricter marketability restrictions.

The case details the state of the e-cigarette industry in 2013, including consumer data, distribution, competition from similar products, and public health concerns. Students will analyze the current regulatory environment, determine what outcome would be most favorable to the e-cigarette industry, and identify the ways to achieve that goal.

This case focuses on ethics issues arising from the tobacco trade. Government as regulator of that trade and guardian of public health faced complex political, financial and ethical issues in discharge of its responsibilities. The harms resulting from tobacco use were well-known and had generally attracted adverse decisions from governments everywhere. The company offering tobacco products for sale, Carreras Ltd., had generally continued to do well financially despite those adverse decisions. Government, in the present case, had introduced legislation to penalize tobacco use in public places, and in so doing, raised several ethical issues such as punishing smokers for using a legal, widely distributed product; classifying cigarettes as harmful to health yet allowing its wide distribution and sale; continuing to derive substantial tax revenue from sale of a harmful product; enabling Carreras to profit from sale of said harmful product; offering little help to smokers to break their nicotine addiction. Students should be asked to identify and recommend solutions to the ethical issues faced by: the government and its “point man”, the Minister of Health as they sought to reduce the public’s use of a harmful product. The smoker who may be even addicted to a product is known to cause or contribute to a host of serious diseases. Students were to identify and recommend solutions to ethical issues faced by the players in the case. One of these players was Carreras whose operations were facing severe regulatory and public relations headwinds. Another was the nonsmoking public whose health was put at risk even though they did not use the product. The sentences could be reworded to read; Carreras, in its continued efforts to justify selling a harmful product. Nonsmokers who, despite not using the product, suffered adverse health consequences because of its use by others.

Cigarette smoking has been linked to a long list of serious diseases including several cancers, cardio-vascular disease, pulmonary ailments and stroke. Despite several government actions over the years to reduce cigarette smoking, it remained widespread and continued to take a heavy toll on public health. The government’s latest gambit, the Public Health (Tobacco Control) Regulations introduced in 2013, represented the first legislation specifically designed to restrain smoking in “public places”. Carreras Ltd., a subsidiary of British American Tobacco (BAT), had been the only significant provider of cigarettes in Jamaica for several decades and in the period allocated for public feedback, mounted a fierce assault on the Regulations, and galvanized other private sector interests to join in that effort. The case addresses the interaction between government’s roles as guardian and financier of public health, the public’s right of choice, and a company’s right to sell a legal product, albeit one deemed harmful to public health. That government derived substantial tax receipts from trade in that product added another layer of complexity to the matter. The Minister of Health, Dr Fenton Ferguson, was the government’s point man and our protagonist.

Final year University students of Management would have been exposed to ethics theories. Many management courses do not devote enough effort to the study of the interplay between the ethical, financial, and legal and the issues that can arise therefrom to complicate decision-making. The case was structured to invite exploration of this interplay.

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

To recapture lost market share, tobacco giant R. J. Reynolds (RJR) developed Uptown, the first cigarette brand created and targeted specifically at a minority group—in this case, African-Americans. RJR planned to launch a six-month test market in Philadelphia in February 1990, which coincided with national Black History Month. The launch generated grassroots opposition from the black community in Philadelphia, which became intent on ensuring there was “No Uptown in our town or any town.”

After analyzing the case, students should be able to:

• Identify some of the complex issues surrounding targeting specific populations

• Recognize the importance of understanding cultural context

• Recognize the limits of profit-based decision-making

Identify some of the complex issues surrounding targeting specific populations

Recognize the importance of understanding cultural context

Recognize the limits of profit-based decision-making

Tourism and hospitality management, strategy, economics and customer service.

Undergraduate students studying hospitality management, customer satisfaction, customer service and economics.

Dubai International Airport is one of the most celebrated airports worldwide. It was constructed by order of Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum in 1969 and has developed significantly in all sections over the years. Passenger numbers and profits have increased dramatically and the airport has received many awards from various countries and organizations, contributing greatly to economic and tourism development. Dubai International Airport offers unique services and facilities to customers, including the Airport Medical Centre, special needs services, Dubai International Airport Hotel, transportation, lounges, a children's play area, smoking rooms, Al Majlis services, executive flight services, Ahlan services, a modern baggage-handling system and Dubai Duty Free. The quality of service is one of the significant concerns of an international company, including Dubai International Airport, as a high quality brings many benefits to the organization, such as increased customer satisfaction and revenue. Thus, to maintain a high-quality level and compete with other international airports, Dubai International Airport needs to ensure the development of its service.

This cast study will help understand both the services offered by the airport and their features and understand the concepts of increasing value to customers in lieu of money, the contribution of the airport to economic growth, exceeding customers' expectations, intonation in providing services, some factors of competitive advantages, the application of customer satisfaction theories, the services market triangle and providing a role model to other airports.

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

Wrigley launched Eclipse gum in August 1999. In early 2000, Paul Chibe became senior marketing manager for Wrigley's breath freshening portfolio, which included Eclipse. With the disappointing first-year performance of the brand, Chibe needed to take action to turn Eclipse around. His task was to use the opinions from other Wrigley executives and from marketing research data to decide if Eclipse could be turned around or if it should be abandoned.

After reading and analyzing the case, students should be able to:

• Identify the most important variables that drive the success of consumer package goods brands

• Interpret and use data from various types of marketing research to evaluate marketing mix strategies

• Develop fact-based marketing recommendations

Identify the most important variables that drive the success of consumer package goods brands

Interpret and use data from various types of marketing research to evaluate marketing mix strategies

Develop fact-based marketing recommendations

CEO Richard Gedman has suddenly found himself running two separate but potentially related businesses: the slot manufacturing and marketing business that he has been running for years, and a new online and mobile gaming business that has grown incredibly fast over the past couple of years. To sustain success in both businesses, it seems clear that each one will require significant R&D investments. Should he invest in only one or both?

After students analyze the case, they will have a greater appreciation for why successful marketing requires a true understanding of customers and their preferences, rather than (for example) merely examining competitor offerings. They will also have a clearer understanding of how to calculate some of the basic metrics needed to do a marketing analysis (e.g., market share, price per unit) and how these metrics can inform any marketing decisions significantly.

Operations management.

This case can be used in a core course in production and operation management; process management and courses like design and planning of operations at the graduate level, preferably during or after the basic operations module of the course. The case focuses on the use of a process analysis that decomposes the problem into a number of easily solvable sub-problems, each of which could be distinctly analyzed and solved. The case can also be effectively utilized in elective courses on process reengineering, concurrent engineering/management, process management, capacity planning, etc. Ideally, this case can be discussed for 75 to 90 minutes.

The case describes the situation facing the operations supervisor, Sunil Mehta, of A-CAT Corp. in Vidarbha Region, Maharashtra, India. A-CAT Corp. was a mid-sized manufacturer and distributor of domestic electrical appliances, largely catering to the price-sensitive rural population. The firm operated two medium-sized facilities in one of the remote districts in Vidarbha, and these manufacturing units had been in operation since 1986. A-CAT manufactured a relatively wide range of electrical appliances for household use. Typical products from its stable included TV signal boosters, transformers, FM radio kits, electronic ballasts, battery chargers, voltage regulators, etc. The voltage regulators manufactured by A-CAT were used for many different purposes, although the focus was on its flagship product, VR500. The issue at hand for Sunil Mehta, operations supervisor at A-CAT, was to get data and act right; more often than not, this boiled down to critical information which everyone in the firm kept collecting but were too busy to use and utilize. The challenge was to select the right kind of data needed from the data-deluge that the company had in their databases. The eluding objective was to use it for the betterment of the firm. The challenge was to utilize the data that the workers and other operators kept logging in and, in the process of doing so, came up with some solutions to the problems faced on the operational front.

The case teaching and learning objectives are as following: to grasp the basics of process and process parameters; to understand the interrelationship between capacity, utilization, efficiency and productivity of a process; and to carry out process capacity analysis in assessing the performance of the firm on different metric drivers. The case also provides a very good foundation for understanding process parameters in a simple and lucid manner. To make right computations and not to use the terms and terminology in “cook book” or “strait jacketed” manner, students need to realize the parameters and their understanding changes from situation to situation.

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 9: Operations and Logistics.

An instructor could link the case to lean production principles and Kurt Lewin’s change management model, key reading materials on these theories are, namely,  Lewin, K (1947) Frontiers in group dynamics: concept, method and reality in social science; equilibrium and social change. Human Relations 1(1): 5–41  Stewart, J. (2012). The Toyota Kaizen continuum: a practical guide to implementing lean. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Wickramasinghe, V. and Wickramasinghe, G. L. D. (2020). Effects of human resource management practices, lean production practices and lean duration on performance. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 31(11), 1467–1512.

This case was developed from both primary and secondary sources. The primary source included three face to face meetings with Mr CK in University Putra Malaysia (two meetings) and WSAE factory (Rawang, Malaysia – one meeting), respectively. Interviewed three workers at Rawang factory. The secondary source was taken from the company website and company reports.

Dr Wan, the Chief Executive Officer of WSA Engineering Sdn Bhd (WSAE) accepted the invitation from Small Medium Industries Development Corporation to participate in a Malaysian-Japanese Industry Cooperation program that focused on Lean Production System (LPS). Dr Wan was worried about Malaysia’s culture incompatible with Japanese-originated LPS. The case shares how the organization and behavioral change took place, for LPS buy-in. Successes and challenges WSAE faced in the 10-year journey of implementing LPS were elaborated.

This case was written for use in an operations management course, on the topic of lean production. It can also be used as a training material targeting the operation managers of a manufacturing company aiming to implement lean production or any change management process.

Andrea Seid is responsible for tourism marketing in a destination management organization in Colorado. In her position, she faces a difficult decision of whether to promote marijuana-related businesses on her website and in the local welcome centers.

Primary research took place through interviews with Andrea Seid and John Mace, a local business owner. All other data were collected from secondary sources.

This case would help students to apply concepts from courses such as: services marketing, tourism management, destination management and tourism development.

The decision at the root of the case is a real-world application of stakeholder theory.