The future of the Guinness brand (A)

Nespresso, the global leading brand in portioned coffee, is facing an existential threat. The company’s current market base, which consists primarily of aging consumers, is likely to decline in the medium to long term. To compensate for the certain shortfall, the company needs to attract young coffee drinkers among Millennials and Generation Z, whose consumption and values are significantly different from the current base. Management is being forced to reset its historically successful strategy for a new era when today’s young consumers will soon account for the bulk of the global coffee market.

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The case explores the efforts of Hamilton Mann, Group VP, Global Digital Marketing & Digital Transformation at Thales, to build a sales enablement platform as part of Thales’ larger digital transformation. “ContentFlix” aimed to be a one-stop sales enablement platform bringing together content for presentations and sales pitches and integrating solutions from across the business. Thales’ key account teams were used to operating in silos and via face-to-face interactions. Similarly, marketing and sales were distant and did not work together as effectively and seamlessly as they could. ContentFlix was intended to break down those silos and encourage collaboration between the company’s different businesses and marketing and sales teams. Mann’s team had launched ContentFlix quietly, tackling each implementation challenge as it came, and adoption had been steady. The Covid pandemic changed everything. Enforced lockdowns meant that remote cooperation between units became the only way to do business. The platform’s adoption accelerated beyond Mann’s expectations and continued to grow post-pandemic. The case explores how the team planned the platform, supported its rollout across Thales and continued to build it throughout the pandemic and beyond. The case explores in rich detail the obstacles and challenges as well as the successes Mann and his team face. The case closes with the rise of generative AI (GenAI). The team starts to consider where GenAI could enhance ContentFlix. What possibilities were there to take the platform to its next stage of development?

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The (C) case describes the customer’s after-sales experience. The participants need to identify what went wrong again and how the brand might save the customer relationship.

The (B) case describes the same customer’s follow-up experience in the same exclusive retail outlet. The case invites the participants to further identify why the customer experience is going sour and how it could have been better managed.

A short (A) describes the experience of a wealthy Chinese customer going to buy an exclusive watch in the retail outlet of a famous Swiss luxury brand. The customer goes from excitement to disappointment. The case invites the participants to identify the different steps of the pre-sale and in-store customer experience and to suggest how the customer retail experience could have been better managed.

This case is part of a series on Netflix. Case (A) discusses the company's growth until July 2011. Case (B) tells the story of Netflix’s sharp share price decline after it announced it was splitting the business in two and increasing prices. Case (C) covers the years 2012/13, when Netflix found its way back to success. Seeing that the industry bottleneck was shifting from the channel (who can reach the viewers?) to the content (who owns the movie rights?), Netflix started to produce its own TV shows (e.g., House of Cards, Hemlock Grove). Case (D), set in 2020, focuses on a diverse set of strategic challenges Netflix is facing. First, as indicated already in the (C) case, the cost of content through licensing and production continued to increase. Netflix users had to get used to more frequent cancellations of their favorite show. Second, the “streaming war” between Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and YoutTube was intensifying on two fronts: competition for subscribers and for content. Third, Netflix was increasing its global presence to accelerate economies of scale by introducing new pricing strategies in foreign countries. Fourth, most movies are watched on mobile phones, where a vertical format is more natural than the traditional horizontal format. It was an open question whether movie producers should adopt this trend set by Instagram and TikTok. Thanks to the growing subscriber base, Netflix’s revenue and profitability were increasing. But is the company well equipped for the intensifying “streaming war”?

Nespresso, the global leading brand in portioned coffee, is facing an existential threat. The company’s current market base, which consists primari...