Category Archives: Marketing

The 10 best Marketing cases I have ever taught

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As the new academic year rises on the horizon, I thought about the cases (in Marketing) that I have taught in past few years and listed the top ten. My best teaching experiences – taking into account the best learning experiences of my students – took place while teaching these cases.

The list is slightly inclined towards marketing strategy, and does not include the good old work-your-way-through-it numerical analysis cases as these are required but do become somewhat boring at times. I have listed only the interesting cases, which really connect with students and sometimes even divide the class!

Most of these cases can be taught across programs and years (perhaps a few are not suitable for the first-year basic marketing course, and many are unsuitable for undergraduate courses) with a little flexibility, creativity, and improvisation from the faculty. Then again, you can’t have a course of just these cases – these are best consumed as the laddus in a diet that otherwise consists of good old dal-chawal-roti-subzi, in my view.

These cases are tried and tested for that ideal combination of fun and learning (in the 750-odd hours that I have taught with cases so far with full-time MBA, executive/online MBA, in-campus MDP, and online MDP participants). Of course, all bets are off if students have not analysed the case prior to the class discussion.

Here’s the list, in the order of most interesting first. Complete case titles are provided at the end.

  1. Whatsapp Payments – where to play, how to win, and do so in a market evolving so fast that the where and how keep changing – I hope the managers from UCO Bank have not forgotten our discussion yet!
  2. Tanishq – a tad dated, but this case is a hit because you have to choose – the rural customer who wants something which is not the same as what the urban customer wants, but rural is a big market and needs its own positioning – a juicy dilemma of the highest order!
  3. Maggi – students’ love for Maggi translates directly to life in the class – this case spreads all the way from crisis-handling and regulator relationship to competitive strategy and social media management – the case can be built upon using the recent (~March 2024) McDonald’s fake cheese almost-crisis.
  4. Herman Miller – this one is tricky because the pre-class reading (in terms of page length and case details) is on higher side, but discussing this case is like solving a puzzle – not your simple Rubik’s cube but a really confusing cube that reveals new colors every time your twist it. Need I mention that the case is on sustainability?!
  5. Paez – this one is about footwear (!), and not luxury footwear but a home-grown South American brand in a product category rarely seen in cases – the case is on positioning and actually gives students a few options, but if you do your analysis well, all options are bad! What more can you ask of a case?!
  6. TiVo – new product marketing for a really, really new product – but this case requires careful handling and pre-discussion prep as television is not something the current generation can relate well to – the context can then segue into Apple Vision Pro, foldable phones, and most new tech products such as smart watches and Alexa.
  7. Starbucks – spend $20 million on additional employee hours, or not? Increase customization of drinks, or not? Rely on market research, or not? And beyond the case, questions like: add masala chai and filter coffee to the menu, and dilute the brand but adapt to the Indian market, or not?
  8. Puma’s Maya – Virtual influencers are the craze these days, but in the early days when nobody knew what a virtual influencer was and whether it would work, a little-known company in South East Asia decided to build one for Puma – a fun case that can build towards all things virtual, including customer experience and customer engagement, and the growing role of AI in all things martech.
  9. L’Oreal Paris – the title might be a little off-putting but that should not deter either the case facilitator or the students – L’Oreal has been doing digital, and quite well at that, for several years now, and it’s great fun to see how they decide on new products using social media listening (and planting).
  10. Commerce Bank – this bank, in the case at least, has unique way of trading off a lower interest rate against fun activities (think jugglers and walking soft toys) in the bank branch. Unbelievable and rightly so, but the case gets students thinking – why should finance and banking be boring and tiring to customers?
  11. Bonus: Real events –interesting real incidents and decisions not formally written up into cases – the absence of a structured set of facts and a story ready to read is usually compensated by the freshness of the incident – how Budweiser faced the last minute problem in selling its drinks at the Qatar World Cup through the #BringHometheBud campaign, how the same Budweiser dug itself into a hole with an influencer, and how they dug themselves out of the hole by reinforcing their positioning through advertising…

To case teachers reading this, I hope this list is useful and makes you revisit or reinforce your own favorite cases. Am eager to hear and learn from you about your case experiences. Write to me at npriya(at)iimk(dot)ac.in. Equally eager to hear from students!

Complete case titles for the cases above:

  1. WhatsApp: Creating and Communicating Value for WhatsApp Payments
  2. Tanishq: Positioning to Capture the Indian Woman’s Heart
  3. The Maggi Noodle Safety Crisis in India (A)
  4. Cradle-to-Cradle Design at Herman Miller: Moving Toward Environmental Sustainability
  5. Paez
  6. TiVo (first version dated 2000)
  7. Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service
  8. Puma’s “Maya”: Southeast Asia’s First Virtual Influencer
  9. Ombre, Tie-Dye, Splat Hair: Trends or Fads? “Pull” and “Push” Social Media Strategies at L’Oréal Paris
  10. Commerce Bank

The CMO’s Playbook – This Year’s Collage

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Whenever the small-group discussions in the classroom get noisy, it means one of two things: the students are so interested that they forget they are in a classroom, or there are movies playing in laptops, hidden by the huddle of heads. When these discussions are about marketing strategy in The CMO’s Playbook, it’s the former.

Sometimes we teachers are happy when the class is loud.

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Here is a (hand-made) collage from the cases and contexts that we discussed in the course last year (2023 Jun-Aug). Can you identify all the companies and situations?!

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Here are a few answers.

Coca Cola in India: A product portfolio worth boasting about, but who wants sugar and fizz now? This was (and is, and will continue to be) the dilemma of what is perhaps the world’s best built brand (for a brand backed by hardly any product worth its price). The new year spells interesting times for Coca Cola and more so for Coca Cola India with cannibals and competitors galore.

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“India’s social network” is tea. The question is, which tea?!

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First published July 2, 2023. Updated Oct 31, 2023 with a) an edited version of the ad shared by Red Label (following my article?!), and b) link to relevant research article.

A recent advertisement projects the humble tea as “India’s social network”. The ad is probably trending by this time, and worth at least one watch. The customer insight is spot-on. The video portrays various ways in which tea takes the form of friend requests, likes, shares, trends, stories, and so on in India, becoming a social network in itself. Engrossed as we are in the narrative, we forget that this is a brand’s commercial. Finally, though, the very last shot tells us that the ad is from Brooke Bond Red Label.

Screen shot from the “India’s social network” ad (watch the full ad here)

Well, as I watched the ad play, my thoughts centred on the cup of Kanan Devan (Tata Tea) tea that I usually drink in the morning and evening… steaming tea in a steel tumbler… the quantity never enough but I never make more… I am happiest when that tea is fully foamy at the top… and when I blow on it a teeny bit, the foam makes space for the beautiful brown color beneath… if the color is the right shade, the tea will be the right taste… oh yes, the tea packet at home is nearly finished and I need to buy another of the green packets soon…

These and many other thoughts ran parallel to the ad that was playing. And so, when the ad ended with a visual of Red Label, the first thought that struck me was: I was thinking of Kanan Devan the whole time! Nothing in the ad would have helped me predict that the ad was by Red Label. For that matter, nothing in the ad suggested it was from any brand, and the ad could easily have been from the Tea Board of India, let alone brands such as Taj Mahal or Wagh Bakri or Tata Tea or any of the umpteen tea brands that fight for India’s throats.

Oh, well. Not good, says the marketer in me. If the ad does not unmistakably cue the brand, then why run the ad at all? Simple marketing wisdom says that the purpose of an ad is to strengthen the brand and/or drive purchase. But in the case of the Red Label ad, I am very likely to forget the brand, remember only the story, and even connect the story to a different brand, perhaps my favourite brand. Put simply, all this effort from one brand, and its competitor gets the benefit!

Understandably, brands that wish to narrate a story would not like to show the brand logo throughout the story as that could prevent viewers from being immersed in the story. A similar reason holds for not identifying the brand at the beginning of the ad: why spoil the story by bringing crass commercialism at the start? Then again, presenting the brand at the end of the campaign video poses a risk, as we see in the case of Red Label. (The whole issue might not arise if the brand is already identified, such as through a label on the YouTube video or search result. But consumers are not always paying attention to labels.)

So, can a marketer ever safely show the brand at the end? To answer this, we need to consider how the mind works. Product cues such as tea being consumed at a chai stall can spontaneously evoke “mental associations” – a collection of related information and memories such as product color, category, shape, prior consumption experiences, brands in the category, and so on that the consumer has built up over time. For example, a piece of chocolate could cue the purple color, the Cadbury brand, a recent purchase of chocolate, the taste of one’s favorite chocolate, and even the memorable Five Star “do nothing” campaign (watch it for fun, you won’t regret it).

When a product is shown without any brand information, the situation is ripe for the consumer mind to come up with related information and memories, which is very likely to include the consumer’s favorite brand and other top-of-mind brands. And so, the ad on “India’s social network” that shows many instances of tea itself and tea being consumed, and is thus replete with product category cues, triggers thoughts of a wide set of tea brands. By the time the viewer reaches the end, the Red Label brand hardly makes an impression.

Is there a way out? One solution is to cue brand in subtle way or in a manner that integrates with the story. Coca Cola’s recent art gallery ad does this very well. Another way is to use a story that cues the category very lightly or not at all. A Fevicol ad from 2019 that recently became popular uses this technique; the narrative is all about a sofa that passes hands for generations. By not cueing the category explicitly, the ad drives curiosity without crowding the consumer’s mind with brand names. Ads launched by market leader brands might not face as much a problem as other brands in the market.

The solutions above might not result in an ad that seems “ingenious” or “fabulous” as some social media comments have termed the Red Label “India’s social network” ad, but they will certainly help Red Label reap the benefits of its effort. And prevent the ad being attributed to Kanan Devan!

P.S. In carefully viewing later, I noticed that a product pack is indeed shown towards the beginning when Mrs. Masurkar makes tea. Very incongruously placed, though – in most kitchens, the tea packet is usually on the shelf, not the counter. The tea jar is what the customer handles every day.

Updates:

a) Red Label has uploaded, on Aug 29, 2023 – about two months after my article was posted – an edited 20-second version of the social network ad on its YouTube channel. (The original ad was uploaded Jun 29, 2023.) Interestingly, this edited ad starts with a shot that clearly shows the tea package (this was the very last shot in the original ad) and sports the brand logo on the top right throughout the ad. I would like to think that this is so because of my post and the subsequent discussions on LinkedIn! 🙂

b) The 2004 article ‘Do Not Wait to Reveal the Brand Name: The Effect of Brand-Name Placement on Television Advertising Effectiveness’ by William E. Baker, Heather Honea, and Cristel Antonia Russell in the Journal of Advertising examines the above issue in detail. The article is available at the journal website here.

Next Diwali, Let’s Avoid the Condescension of Doing Good? [Financial Express]

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on May 27, 2022 in the Financial Express and is available here on the publisher’s website. In this article, I present my take on the “condescension of doing good” that is visible in recent Diwali advertising, and urge marketers to put human values first.

The version below includes links to the relevant advertisements that I discuss.

It was Cadbury that hit upon the idea of brands doing good during Diwali in a seriously big way – the 2020 ad from Cadbury Celebrations showed how small local stores that were hit by the pandemic could be brought into the customer’s consideration set through geography-based hyper-personalization. “This is not just a Cadbury ad,” they said, and so we believed: the ad nudged us towards local stores. Thus it was that in the midst of the pandemic, Cadbury found a way to do good and be good, and yet gain marketing momentum.

But the next year, as the prestige factor was upped, Shah Rukh Khan’s charisma was deemed essential to do the same job for a similar ad by Cadbury. In this ad, Shah Rukh Khan names local stores in his voiceover and this, again, was powered by technology. It wasn’t too bad, except the realization that our purchases of Celebrations were funding the expense incurred in engaging the celebrity actor.

But this year? With its #ShopsForShopless ad of 2022, Cadbury has, despite its best intentions, fallen prey to “purpose”, the new catchword in marketing. Somebody (or worse, everybody) at Cadbury seems to have decided that for Celebrations to stand out, it had to be tagged with purpose. So, now that good old eating and gifting are not enough for Diwali, the Cadbury ad tells us to scan a QR code on the sweet box, help roadside hawkers set up virtual shops, and buy from such shops. For the kind of “help” that they received, the gratitude in the eyes of Damodar (not Damodarji?!) and his helper is nauseating in its excessiveness.

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Learning Marketing from Shelby Hunt – A Tribute

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(c) Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode

Caution: this article is on academic research. If that isn’t your cup of tea, you could read my recent popular article on The CMO’s Playbook instead.

Context of this article

About three months ago, reading (again) Shelby Hunt’s “The nature and scope of marketing”, I decided to write to Prof. Hunt, not with any particular research question or objective, but to interact once with the great mind that could, in one sweeping paragraph, summarize all of marketing till then:

“During the past three decades, two controversies have overshadowed all others in the marketing literature. The first is the “Is marketing a science?” controversy sparked by an early JOURNAL OF MARKETING article by Converse entitled “The Development of a Science of Marketing.” Other prominent writers who fueled the debate included Bartels, Hutchinson, Baumol, Buzzell, Taylor, and Halbert. After raging throughout most of the ’50s and ’60s, the controversy has since waned. The waning may be more apparent than real, however, because many of the substantive issues underlying the marketing science controversy overlap with the more recent “nature of marketing” (broadening the concept of marketing) debate. Fundamental to both controversies are some radically different perspectives on the essential characteristics of both marketing and science.” (Hunt 1976, p. 17, emphasis added)

Reading this the first time, towards the end of the second year of my PhD, I was not impressed. But, having read and written and thought and analysed much, I start to sense in Hunt’s writing a comprehensiveness, clarity, and directness that was not visible to me earlier. To learn that the author of this writing is no longer with us and that the meeting I considered requesting (I even wondered which email address would Prof. Hunt be reachable at, since he had recently retired from his long-standing faculty position), left me with a sense of loss that I did not anticipate. This article is an attempt to understand why.

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Towards The CMO’s Playbook – A reflection on teaching and learning marketing strategy

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Two months ago, forty-seven eager young minds started on a quest for “the CMO’s playbook” – a journey to understand strategic decision making in marketing. An equally eager but not so young mind (yours truly) joined them, mainly to prove that fun and learning can go together. It was a tall ask from all of us, but we managed to pull it off!

Finally, it was the student teams that prepared their original playbooks for CMOs, and I might have merely orchestrated the journey – a journey through a mix of simulation, business cases, discussions of real life marketing, and minimal reliance on pre-cooked frameworks.

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Why the Netflix business model will take more than a quick fix [Forbes India]

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on May 27, 2022 in Forbes India and is available here on the Forbes India website. In this article, I present my take on the key issues at Netflix and a consumer-centric ecosystem approach to solve these issues.

Here is the full text of the article (caution: long read ahead!).

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“You can have mine”—be it a pencil during a kindergarten exam or one earpiece of a pair of earphones, or even a Netflix password, the tendency to share is innately human. A business model that views sharing as a threat is simply swimming against the current.

Netflix’s loss of 200,000 subscribers in less than 100 days to March 2022 has been surprising and yet, in hindsight, quite inevitable. For over 20 years, this much-vaunted disruptor of the movie industry has played the same game. The decline in subscriber numbers is just another indicator that it is time Netflix recalibrates its business model which is no longer the recipe for success that it once was. Indeed, the growing young population in the so-called emerging markets might well have been prolonging the death of a cracking business model that has ceased to be about customer value.

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Me e Mia: An Introspection into Brand Love

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Part I: The Customer’s Perspective

© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor at IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

The other day, I shared a thought on LinkedIn on the Mothers’ Day video of a jewelry brand. Mine wasn’t a well thought out analysis, it was simply a spontaneous reaction to the content of the video. Writing the post, however, made me wonder: why did I care so much? Why was I so strongly unhappy with the ad? (The tone implied in “golden shoulders” surprises me now!)

Well, eight years ago, I on about this very same brand, on wearing the Tanishq Mia mantle of confidence.

Rereading that led to some introspection, which then led to the conclusion: I am in love. Yes, I don’t wear much gold jewelry but I love the brand that is Tanishq. Naturally, I felt the possessive anger that only love can lead to when Tanishq made a statement I didn’t feel good about or agree with. So says the marketer in me about the consumer in me. Me e mia. Me and mine. Me and my brand.

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The Customer Unmasked: What the Indian shopper will buy when the pandemic is over and out (Economic Times Brand Equity)

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© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published on March 15, 2022 in the Economic Times Brand Equity Blog and is available here on the ET website. In this article, I present my take on what the “customer unmasked” would be like. Here is the full text of the article (caution: long read ahead!).

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With the pandemic on the decline, it is a good time for marketing managers to gather their thoughts on what the future will bring. Shopping behavior of customers is going to change, but in what way? Five key insights tell us what the post-pandemic future of shopping could look like.

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