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By 2009 Netflix had all but trounced its traditional bricks-and-mortar competitors in the video rental industry. Since its founding in the late 1990s, the company had changed the face of the industry and threatened the existence of such entrenched giants as Blockbuster, in large part because of its easy-to-understand subscription model, policy of no late fees, and use of analytics to leverage customer data to provide a superior customer experience and grow its e-commerce media platform. Netflix's investment in data collection, IT systems, and advanced analytics such as proprietary data mining techniques and algorithms for customer and product matching played a crucial role in both its strategy and success. However, the explosive growth of the digital media market presents a serious challenge for Netflix's business going forward. How will its analytics, customer data, and customer interaction models play a role in the future of the digital media space? Will it be able to stand up to competition from more seasoned players in the digital market, such as Amazon and Apple? What position must Netflix take in order to successfully compete in this digital arena?

To examine the benefits and risks of investment in analytical technology as a means for mining customer data for business insights. Students will develop a strategy position for Netflix's investment in technology and its digital media business. Students must also consider how new corporate partnerships and changes to the customer channel model will allow the company to prosper in the highly competitive digital space.

Marketing, Innovation, Strategy, Digital Marketing and E-Business.

Master's level and Executive Program.

MocDoc is a young Indian online health-care company that has achieved success in early years of establishment, and is looking forward to expand the customer base. The founder, Senthil Peelikkampatti, along with his friends decided to design a service that can bridge the gap between doctor and patients. However, initially, Senthil lost the trust in his idea due to the unacceptance of the idea by health-care experts. It took a little long for the team to gain visibility after launch of the service. Senthil and the team brainstormed to gain recognition online through different techniques of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media networking through Facebook Web site. MocDoc case is designed to stimulate discussion of a broad array of entrepreneurial issues related to online start-ups. In particular, it deals with strategy and marketing of service in the online arena. At the same time, it gives detailed overview of marketing techniques online as fuel to the business. The company is moving under strong leadership skills of CEO but fails to gain momentum in terms of gaining online customers. This case deals with decision-making capabilities to bring more number of registered customers in the online space.

The expected learning outcomes are as follows: to animate online business environment and challenges faced by virtual enterprises in the cyber space; to illustrate opportunity for students to speculate the start-up business environment; to illustrate opportunity to introduce cloud computing as a viable business option for the health-care industry; to develop understanding among students for designing effective marketing strategy for online business; to identify business opportunities and gaining competitive edge by offering bouquet of services; and to stimulate business environment for understanding innovation and strategy building.

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

After Hurricane Katrina hit the coast of Louisiana on August 29, 2005, Wal-Mart initiated emergency operations that not only protected and reopened its stores, but also helped its employees and others in the community cope with the disaster's personal impact. This response was part of a wider effort by the company under CEO Lee Scott to improve its public image. Wal-Mart's efforts were widely regarded as the most successful of all corporations in the aftermath of the disaster and set the standard for future corporate disaster relief programs.

Move beyond the operational dimensions of disaster response and appreciate how disaster response is connected to the company's strategy and its position in the market place. Understand how disasters are different than other types of reputational crises and are subject to different expectation from the public. Understand how a company can do well by doing good: how it can do the right thing and benefit its business at the same time. Discuss the changing expectations of companies to act in the public interest.

This compact case provides a relatively large data set that students explore using visualization and a Tableau dynamic dashboard that they create. Students were asked to describe what the data set contained in relation to employee attrition experience of Baca Beverage Distributors (BBD). The application and managerial questions are set in human resources and a company that is facing high attrition during the pandemic.

BBD shared their data and problem scenario for this compact case. The protagonist, Morgan Matthews, was the authors’ contact and provided significant clarification and guidance about the data. Both the company and the protagonist have been disguised. Some of the job positions have been rephrased. All names of employees, supervisors and managers have been replaced with codes.

During the 2020–2022 pandemic years, BBD experienced, like many companies, a higher than usual employee turnover rate and Morgan Matthews, Director of People, was concerned. Not only was it time-consuming, expensive and disruptive but the company had prided itself on being a good place to work. Were they hiring the right people, people that fit the company culture and people that fit the positions for which they were hired? The company had been using the Predictive Index [1] when on-boarding employees. In addition, there were results from self-reviews and manager reviews that could be used. Morgan wondered if data visualization and visual analytics would be useful in describing their employees and whether it would reveal any opportunities to improve the turnover rate. Before seeking a solution for the high turnover, it was important to step back and learn what the data said about who was leaving and the reasons they gave for leaving.

This compact case can be used in courses that include visualization using Tableau and dashboards. As it is a compact case, it requires less preparation time from the students and less class time for discussion. The case is for students who have been recently introduced to business analytics, specifically visualization and data storytelling with Tableau. For this reason, significant guidance has been provided in the case assignment. The level of the case can be adjusted by the amount of guidance provided in the case assignment. Courses include introduction to business analytics, descriptive analytics and visualization, communication through data storytelling. The case can be used for all modalities – in person, hybrid, online. The authors use it here for visualization and dynamic dashboards but using the same data set and compact case description, exploratory data analysis could be assigned.

Supplementary material for this article can be found online.

Hundreds of thousands of would-be hoteliers have been popping up all around the world, hoping to rent their own homes and apartments to complete strangers through a service called Airbnb. The goal of Airbnb’s aspiring hosts was to use the company’s website to attract guests who were willing to pay the highest rates to stay in their homes for a short time. For Airbnb, the goal was to improve customer review performance so it could, in turn, increase profits. How could the company achieve its goal? Enter text mining, a technique that allowed businesses to scour Internet pages, decipher the meaning of groups of words, and assign the words a sentiment proxy through the use of a software package.

In order for text mining to be useful for Airbnb, its marketing professionals first had to gain access to customer review data on the company’s own website. The team then had to analyze the data to find ways to improve property performance. Was the team going to be able to leverage this large amount of data to determine a strategy going forward?

In May 2016, Sarita Digumarti, Chief Operating Officer of Jigsaw Academy in Bengaluru, India, faced a challenging situation. Jigsaw Academy provided online courses in data analytics and Big Data at the beginner, intermediate and advanced levels for students as well as working professionals. It was perceived that plenty of students from premier institutions in India had a high level of theoretical knowledge about the process involved in number crunching and data analysis; however, the hands-on experience on actual business problems or actual data sets was a major limitation with these students. Given the rapid growth of the analytics sector and the limited number of academic institutions offering analytics courses, there was a lack of availability of the right skills in the analytics market. Jigsaw Academy seized this opportunity and started offering relevant courses. All efforts were made to enhance the number of students enrolling for the courses, which in turn resulted in improving its customer base. Realizing the demand of industries for employees skilled in the analytics sector, Jigsaw Academy wanted to grow its brand equity and to achieve this through business to business (B2B) collaborations and/or alliances. However, expansion through B2B has its own challenges. Given the competitive landscape of analytics market, Jigsaw Academy was wondering whether they should opt for B2B channel, and if yes, the question was related to the process of choosing potential B2B partners.

The authors have collected the data from primary sources as well as secondary sources. Primary sources include field visits and audio-recorded interviews conducted with key departmental heads in the organization. Secondary sources include data retrieved from the company website and the relevant information available about the industry with the assistance of the internet. Except the founder’s name, all other names are disguised to protect the individual’s privacy as per instructions from the founders of Jigsaw Academy.

This case can be used at the graduate or MBA level in courses such as entrepreneurship, sales and distribution management, strategic alliances and mergers.

The case revolves around a marketing/sales executive who works in the Ad Sales wing of a popular search engine. Over the course of the case, the protagonist realizes that their marketing strategy needs to refocus on a different vertical than the one they have been paying the most attention to. He had done the required data analysis and feels the data strongly points to a need for change in their strategy. However, he needs to convincing the higher management by put together a compelling pitch using storytelling elements, so that the message in his data gets across clearly, compelling them to act.

This case was developed solely for the purpose of classroom discussion. Some details of the case, including names of the companies, have been disguised. This case is not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of academic or business data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management of the personnel or company.

Only when the custodial staff showed up at his office door did Vinod Mehra realize that it was already 3 am. Vinod is the VP of Supply Chain for Dockomo Heavy Machinery Equipment Limited. He had spent the entire night analyzing the data from the spare parts division in Pune, India. It was April 15 and he had just two weeks to go before the annual review of the company.

The spare parts division's growth at Dockomo has slowed down to about 10 percent annually when compared to the growth rate of 20 percent an nually over the previous years. Their cancelled orders stood at a staggering 8 percent due to parts unavailability, but at the same time the inventory in the system was $6 million higher than the previous year. Vinod was unsure of the response he would receive from the board of directors, since the inventory level increased along with the number of cancelled orders.

At the meeting, the board was considerate, but Vinod was asked to conduct an analysis of the shortcomings and prepare a report on the leading causes for the unavailability of parts to the customers. He was also asked to prepare a report on the approach to be followed to fix these problems by the next quarterly meeting. Vinod was already aware of many issues which existed in the supply chain, but he had to go through a complete analysis to gain a clearer understanding of the shortcomings in their distribution processes.

This case introduces the context of seaport logistics supply chain management with a focus on the issues of risk management in handling and transportation of dangerous goods (DG). The authors present the following learning objectives under the overarching framework of Bloom’s Taxonomy as follows: To understand the severity of handling and transportation of DG in the export supply chain context. To understand the relevance of multi-criteria decision-making in risk assessment. To apply Delphi Technique to appropriately explain the process of risk assessment in a supply-chain context.

It was midnight on December 21, 2020, and Nishadh Amonkar, Chief Executive Officer, Yorokobi, was still awake recollecting his telecon with Tushar Rane, the Head-Materials, Western Maharashtra site of Crop Life Pvt Ltd. The organization was developing and manufacturing pesticides and other specialty chemicals for its clients worldwide. As new and diverse products were being manufactured in the organization, transportation of the products was becoming challenging. The case highlights the need for a data driven risk assessment approach to manage supply chains that were prone to product driven risks such as the handling and transportation of DG.

This course is suitable at the Master of Business Administration level for the following courses: Supply Chain Management (Focus/Session: Supply Chain Risk Management), Logistics Management (Focus/Session: Risks in Logistics and Supply Chain), Research Methodology (Focus/Session: Application of Delphi Technique).

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 9: Operations and logistics.

Management: human resources management.

Undergraduate and postgraduate.

This case gives critical insights in the complex issues surrounding the management of employment relationship in Africa, specifically focusing on Botswana. It is set in the context of explosive industrial relations involving Debswana Diamond Mining Company and the Botswana Mine Workers Union over the contentious issues of pay bonus and collective bargaining. Failure to reach an amicable compromise by both parties' results in a debilitating strike which costs the company millions of funds and affected it's the corporate image contrary to its well crafted social responsibility. More painfully, the end game is a loss of employment and dreams shattered for 461 dismissed workers who depended solely on this work as their only source of income.

At the end of reading the case students are expected to: understand the limits of managerial prerogative and the right to manage; appreciate the inherent conflict of interests between labour and capital; consider more equitable compensation schemes in dealing with collective bargaining; and discuss the concept of social responsibility in the context internal customers-employees.

Teaching note.