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Participants will learn to analyze the basis of consumer segmentation in management education. It will specifically highlight the importance of positioning in influencing the marketing strategy of a firm and discuss the importance of a differentiated-low cost strategy to gain competitive advantage. The case will familiarize students with the business environment of rural India, and the applicability of the 4A’s and the 5D’s framework. Finally, the case will help participants understand the difference between a rural market and a Bottom-of-Pyramid (BoP) market.

A rural MBA institute for BoP students is grappling with the problem of low admissions, leading to an existential crisis. Two divergent options are presented to the protagonist. The first is to close down the B-school and use the infrastructure and facilities for a well-funded government skill development program which is vocational and intended for creating blue-collar workers. The second is to find ways to bolster the B-school to ensure that it gets adequate student enrollment, thereby leading to profitability.

This case is suitable for an undergraduate or MBA course in marketing management, rural marketing in India, South-Asian marketing or strategic marketing.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or e-mail support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. There is an accompanying spreadsheet with the case for studying the market. It contains relevant market data that would support analysis of the case. Comments are added for easy understanding. Instructors can access the separate spreadsheet that works out the break-even calculations for the fee structure of the institute. Instructions on calculations as well as comments are added for easy understanding.

CSS 8: Marketing.

The case concerns strategy.

This study is applicable to information system, development sector and application of technology in development sector.

Krutika Terracotta Unit is a small unit located in Bhubaneswar, Odisha (India), owned by Mr Tarun Tapan Sahoo. The organization product portfolio varies from decorative statues, pots and vessel to customized products demanded by customers. Organization is also involved in training and renting the products for traditional fairs, marriages and religious ceremony in Bhubaneswar along with order sales. The case attempts to get a close picture of the industry. The exercise of developing the vision, mission, and goals for the organization was carried out and an attempt was made to align the information system with the business objectives even though the organization does not have a very structured organogram. Using BIS will surely reduce manual work and will give qualitative output. There will be lesser hassles in management. The defined and integrated approach will also help in taking strategic decisions well. The objective is to develop and apply well-structured BIS which can be integrated with the existing system so as to develop the terracotta organization in terms of reachability and profit-making with better decision-making capacity.

To learn about the business model of a handicraft marketing organization; to learn about the processes involved in traditional art form of Terracotta; to go through the exercise of creating vision, mission, goals of the organization through mutual discussion and expectation of owner; to determine how BIS helps in achieving higher productivity in Krutika Terracotta Unit; and to get an idea about how NPV calculation and social ROI should be measured for finding feasibility of technology investment.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Defence statement has been uploaded. Consent form to publish has been uploaded.

This case, along with its B case (UVA-QA-0865), is an effective vehicle for introducing students to the use of machine-learning techniques for classification. The specific context is predicting customer retention based on a wide range of customer attributes/features. The specific techniques could include (but are not limited to): regressions (linear and logistic), variable selection (forward/backward and stepwise), regularizations (e.g., LASSO), classification and regression trees (CART), random forests, graduate boosted trees (xgboost), neural networks, and support vector machines (SVM).

The case is suitable for an advanced data analysis (data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence) class at all levels: upper-level business undergraduate, MBA, EMBA, as well as specialized graduate or undergraduate programs in analytics (e.g., masters of science in business analytics [MSBA] and masters of management analytics [MMA]) and/or in management (e.g., masters of science in management [MScM] and masters in management [MiM, MM]).

The teaching note for the case contains the pedagogy and the analyses, alongside the detailed explanations of the various techniques and their implementations in R (code provided in Exhibits and supplementary files). Python code, as well as the spreadsheet implementation in XLMiner, are available upon request.

Industrial Relations and People Management.

Graduate or Postgraduate level, Executive working in manufacturing sector.

This case highlights the industrial relation issues in a public sector undertaking, a government-owned company in India. The case depicted the issues taken place in the company in the year 2015-2016. The primary data were collected by a working professional, who dealt with and was involved in the scenarios discussed in the case. Other modes such as in-depth interviews were also taken as per requirements. This case also highlights the importance of roles of unions and association in these organizations. Factors which are important to maintain industrial harmony were analyzed and their perspective with respect to production loss were addressed.

Every employee must be dealt with in a dignified manner with rationale. Hierarchy is required to be in place but doesn’t need to be authoritative. Be communicative and transparent while taking action. There should be no compromise on indiscipline at workplace and decision to be taken accordingly. Manage conflict by involving all the concerned authorities from outset. The analysis of the case shows that if the rationale was followed while managing the people it will lead to industrial harmony. Role of trade unions and association will prove beneficial as they will become a part of creating a solution in the matter of discords, ensuring growth for the company and its employees. It is important to mention here that the case was developed on the basis of the first-hand experience of the author.

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 6: Human Resource Management.

Management scholars and researchers have long been concerned about the impact and relevance of their work. Here we chronicle the teaching, research, management, and personal leadership development lessons that have arisen from a collaborative, decade-long relationship between three management faculty members and the senior management team of a major Norwegian-based global shipping and logistics company. This relationship grew from the creation of a teaching case in 1997 to many years of productive and meaningful work together, including the development and delivery of the all-conference Plenary Session at the 2006 Eastern Academy of Management Meeting, held concurrently with the annual CASE Association Conference. At the 2006 Plenary Session, each of the authors expressed powerful personal and professional development through their collaboration over the years, which is summarized in this article. Reflections, lessons and future research directions are provided.

Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Marketing and Services Marketing.

The New Wella Salon case (B) is suitable for teaching at MBA level and last-year students of undergraduate-level courses in services marketing and entrepreneurship.

This case discusses the challenges faced by a young entrepreneur Mr Meer, who has successfully brought a new trend in the salon industry of Sukkur City. The new trend focuses on trendier and sophisticated services keeping in mind the changing mindset of consumer and services provided by leading salons of Pakistan. Though, the new salon has proved to be a great success. But recent developments have badly shaken the well-established brand. The most challenging issue was the loss of customers to competition, showing a negative sign for the future of this leading brand of local salon industry. He was confused and upset about the future of the leading salon brand of the local industry. He knew that he has to make some strategic decisions to secure his career and family business but appeared to be confused about how to operationalize these. He soon realized that word-of-mouth publicity and running a Facebook page would not be enough to promote his business effectively; so, he has to explore some new ways to promote his unique and nascent service other than advertising. But what should those be? To capture the growing demand of trendy services and scattered populations as a result of growing competition from similar salons, Meer has chalked down two different options: open another salon at a promising avenue and/or offer more services.

To identify and differentiate between traits of an entrepreneur and traditional businessman. To discuss how services companies can create and sustain competitive advantage. To understand the various strategic aspects of the small businesses that lever their decision-making. To work out strategic choices available to a new entrepreneurial firm, evaluate the alternatives and devise strategies for successful expansion of the business. To assess the usefulness of traditional and non-traditional marketing channels for promoting a small business.

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.

Islamic Accounting, Auditing, Strategic Management and Accounting Theory.

The case is suitable for graduate and postgraduate business students, particularly those on courses such as Islamic Accounting, Auditing, Strategic Management and Accounting Theory. The case is based on secondary data collection and all the facts are real.

In the early 2000s, the Tabung Haji (TH) faced financial difficulty, particularly regarding its returns from investments and, with the intention of helping to improve this situation, the General Manager (GM) of Finance and the GM of Investment decided to accept an investment proposal presented by an investment company. The proposal involved initial and subsequent investment portfolios of RM50 million and RM150 million, respectively. The proposal was presented in a board meeting and was approved by the board. Indeed, the two GMs were delighted to receive a return of RM12.5 million from their RM50 million initial investment – i.e. 25 per cent return. In the process of approving the subsequent investment of RM150 million, the two GMs were informed that their investments were partly for the FOREX market (Foreign Exchange Market/Currency Market). At that time, there was no conclusive decision on the status of investment in the FOREX market regarding whether it complied with Sharia principles. The two GMs contemplated whether they should accept this second investment proposal. The issue was whether they should reveal in the board meeting that this investment was partly in FOREX. What if the board failed to accept the idea of investing in FOREX and rejected the proposal? Indeed, they were dropping an opportunity for lucrative returns. Should the GMs seek technical advice on the status of FOREX investment in Islam and present it to the board?

The case should help students to: understand the concept of Sharia and Sharia financial principles; understand the process involved in TH investment decisions; analyze the issues involved in decision-making and apply the relevant theories to describe the actions; and recommend various alternative course of actions in a given 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.

Strategic Management.

Master of Business Administration/Executive Program in Management Level.

Rajat Malik started eFin Recruiters in January 2015 an RPO firm solely catering to the finance domain. Positioning eFin Recruiters in a niche domain created serious challenges to be tackled. Rajat was contemplating leveraging the Indian Government’s Startup India campaign launched on January 16, 2016 to his advantage to scale up eFin Recruiters’ operations by 400 per cent and compete with large established players in the RPO industry. Complacency and anticipated retaliatory action by competitors against eFin Recruiters’ positioning in the niche domain were a huge impediment in eFin Recruiters’ path to exponential growth.

This case will enable students to understand the concepts of industry analysis, strategic positioning from the view of an entrepreneurial firm and business level strategy. This case acts as a medium to integrate entrepreneurship and strategy which is of utmost relevance.

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.

“I think I would like to write a case. What do I do now?” The purpose of this paper is to answer this often-asked question by presenting a useful guide for case writers which examines the entire process of case writing beginning with the initial idea and proceeding through required stages leading to the publication of case studies. Further, this guide seeks to emphasize that case writing is a form of research, not just story telling. Ultimately, the increasing interest of scholars in researching, writing, and publishing pedagogical cases provided the impetus for this paper. The four major case writing processes identified in this paper include ideation (idea generation), creation (crafting the case study), application (creating the Instructor’s Manual), and publication (publishing the case). Each of these four processes is presented in detail including examples, pitfalls, and resources. This work is intended to assist novice, as well as experienced, case authors who seek advice on crafting and publishing pedagogical cases in refereed journals. Resources presented in this paper should be helpful especially for aspiring and as yet unpublished case writers.

The paper is based partially on archival research, but most of the content is based on the substantial experience of the authors.

The paper is relevant for upper-level undergraduates as well as graduate students interested in pedagogically based research.

Marketing.

Undergraduate and postgraduate management students.

Small scale business in India employ almost 30 million people contributing 50 per cent to industrial and 45 per cent to the total exports of the country. The rapid growth of internet has made it possible for the small scale start ups to reach its existing and potential customers without investing much. The case highlights this fact describing the journey of “Chumbak” a small scale business from an unknown brand to the foremost favourable funky product of India. Through this case the authors have tried to relinquish a synoptic view of how Chumbak has used varied social media platforms, to engage and connect with its customers. A survey of 147 customers of Chumbak customers shows that engagement through Facebook fan page of Chumbak positively impacts its purchase intention, brand image and leads to positive word of mouth.

The case highlights numerous dynamics of social media marketing and shows the recent social media promoting methods being used by the little scale businesses to ascertain on-going dialogues with their customers. The Case would facilitate the scholars in learning how these platforms may be used alone as a promotional tool not solely to reach the purchasers but additionally to type a higher complete awareness of the products with reference to Chumbak. The case explains that communication happening at varied social media platforms got to be tailored considering the sort of users.

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