First Look

Priya Paul, chairperson of The Park Hotels, an award-winning portfolio of thirteen boutique hotels scattered across India, was in the midst of a brand revitalization program. Landor Associates, a leading brand consultancy, had identified three areas of concern: the shrinking differentiation opportunity provided by the boutique hotel positioning, consumers' negative perceptions of The Park's properties, and a lack of consistency across the hotel properties in the brand portfolio. Competition was heating up, and Paul had a goal to expand her hotel portfolio to twenty properties in the next ten years. Paul knew that she had to make some major changes to her brand, including changing her positioning, choosing a new logo, and selecting the right products and services that enhanced her revitalized brand. And, she had to decide where to site the new hotel properties to best compete against global behemoths, Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, and Intercontinental. How could she best revitalize her brand to stand out in a crowded marketplace, while preserving its rich heritage? Which changes would best propel The Park Hotels into the future?

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Open English, a Miami-based startup offering online English language learning services, had more than 30,000 active students across Latin America in 2012. The company had just closed a $43 million financing round in order to rapidly scale its service to the next level. Nicolette Moreno, co-founder and vice president of product development, felt that a substantial portion of the new funding was needed to rework Open English's platform to enable the additional growth. She was concerned that the company's learning platform (LP)-the core set of software systems used to deliver online lessons-was beginning to show its age. Although one path would be to shore up the LP's capacity incrementally to allow the company to sustain its momentum with minimal disruption, Nicolette felt it was just a matter of time before they had to tackle a complete rewrite of the platform. Although daunting to undertake, a rewrite would allow the company to grow beyond the current LP's capabilities and position them for future success. Nicolette needed to give the board a full sense of what she saw-was now really the right time for a complete rewrite of the LP? What were the risks? And how should she approach the effort?

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Supplements the (A) case.

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No abstract available.

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Considers the marketing and strategic challenges faced by natural beauty brands using the case of Australian-based Jurlique, which was acquired by Pola of Japan in 2011. The case opens two years later in July 2013 when Sam McKay, the chief executive officer, on a visit to Pola's head office in Tokyo, heard news of critical comments about the company and animal testing in a Facebook post from a group in South Australia where the brand had been founded as a small biodynamic farm in 1985. The discussion of Jurlique's involvement with animal testing was a sensitive issue as it contradicted the brand's strong environmentally friendly and ethical positioning. The matter had already arisen during the Pola acquisition as Pola, like all Japanese cosmetics companies, traditionally tested products on animals. The animal testing issue is put in context by a discussion of how during Jurlique's growth as a successful premium brand there had been substantial changes in market position, in part associated with shifts of ownership. At times the brand had been focused on core green consumers, but McKay had sought to broaden the consumer base by repositioning it as making "the most effective products as natural as possible." The company lost few existing customers and found that Jurlique's image was an asset in attracting Chinese consumers who liked the story of the Australian farm that produced most ingredients. However, Chinese regulations refusing to allow the firm's stores to use recycled wood, and mandating of animal testing, were challenging to the brand's global natural brand position. The case can be taught both in marketing classes concerned with green business and in strategy classes exploring the challenges faced by global brands.

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The case focuses on the challenges still confronting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the end of 2013, a year after he has been in office. It also gives an overview of Japan's earlier economic performance, focusing primarily on the period after it suffered a stock market and real estate crash in 1989-1992. During his first year in office, Abe introduced three sets of policies designed both to reverse the deflation that had plagued Japan since around 2000 and to increase the Japanese growth rate. The first of this three-pronged approach consisted of appointing a central bank governor who committed himself to raising the inflation rate and who vastly expanded the Bank of Japan's balance sheet in an effort to accomplish this. The second involved a fiscal policy plan whose initial thrust was expansionary, but which also sought to reduce future budget deficits. The last one involved a series of microeconomic reforms aimed at expanding GDP and labor productivity. These included initiatives aimed at increasing female labor force participation to compensate for Japan's aging population, reforms of the electric power sector directed at reducing electricity costs, and efforts designed to promote the "health and longevity sector." The case ends by discussing Abe's foreign policy challenges, including Korea's and China's reactions to visits by Japanese officials to the Yasukuni shrine.

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The founders of Maricopa, Inc., a startup that sold proprietary hair-care products directly to salons, were preparing a board presentation to address the young company's inability to meet financial projections. While the products had caught on with customers, the financial shortcomings raised some questions about the company's business plan. The company had gone through much of its cash and needed additional funding to continue operating. At the same time, two VC investors were deciding how to proceed with their investments in Maricopa. The larger VC firm questioned Maricopa's management's decisions and was hesitant to further fund the company. However, the Maricopa investment was much more important to the smaller VC firm, and its representative on Maricopa's board worked hard to convince her counterpart from the larger firm that while the firm had struggled, it was a young startup with strong potential. Without the larger firm investing again in Maricopa, the business was at risk of going under.

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This case study explores organizational design and incentive choices related to building a middle management layer as a company scales up its operations. Go Mobile, an Indian mobile phone retailer, uses high-powered incentives to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit among store employees. The company is faced with the challenge of motivating its district managers to support the highly incentivized store teams. On one hand, the district managers are expected to drive a profitable expansion, supporting complex day-to-day operations at the stores. On the other hand, they are expected to instill a culture of exceptional service and integrity among Go Mobile's employees. The case presents different systems that the company could use to motivate the district managers to fulfill these, sometimes conflicting, roles.

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No abstract available.

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This note discusses Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality: how managers may sometimes make suboptimal choices because of their limited ability to access or process information.

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This case examines the changes employed by YouTube to make the massively popular site more attractive to brands. Building from its base of amateur, user-generated content, YouTube had turned to experimenting with professionally made content and organizing its videos into channels. But it still struggled when it came to capturing advertising dollars to its online video platform. The social video website wants to be a "brand-safe" platform that major marketers use to advertise their video ads. Should major brands switch a significant portion of their TV advertising budget to online ads on YouTube?

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In 2012, J Sainsbury Plc (Sainsbury's), the number three supermarket chain in the UK with £22.3 billion in sales, appeared to have put the troubles of the past behind it. For over 70 years, Sainsbury's had been the UK's largest grocer, but Tesco had overtaken it in 1995, and then Asda knocked it into third position in 2003. When Justin King took over as CEO in 2004, UK sales were flat and UK profits languished at 40% below their 1999 levels. He cut prices and restored sales growth, and from 2007 onwards, Sainsbury's had outperformed Tesco on same-store sales growth. What did King need to do to sustain Sainsbury's revival?

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