Between 2013 and 2019, Natura undertook a set of initiatives to begin its digital transformation and accelerate the global expansion that resulted in it becoming the world''s fourth-largest beauty group. Along with its traditional door-to-door operation, Natura opened new channels including e-commerce, mobile apps, and physical stores, while it accelerated its international expansion with the acquisition of the Australian brand Aesop in 2013, .....more

In 2021, the world''s fourth-largest beauty group, Natura &Co, was in the middle of a digital transformation process. Originally a direct-selling company, Natura transitioned to a multichannel business through online and offline channels, while acquiring strong brands such as Aesop, The Body Shop, and Avon. In the A case, the challenge for Natura CEO Jo o Paulo Ferreira''s challenge was to find the right balance between the direct-selling .....more

Heilongjiang Feihe Dairy Co., Ltd. (Feihe) was located in Qiqihar City, a medium-sized city in Heilongjiang Province, northeastern China. Situated in the golden milk source zone at 47 degrees north latitude, the city had been producing powdered milk products and sold them to domestic consumers for 58 years. However, the 2008 melamine incident (MLM) almost wiped out local brands in the domestic infant formula market and left a vacancy for foreign brands .....more

In 2019, Bestore Co. Ltd. went public on the mainboard of China''s Shanghai Stock Exchange. With the mission of bringing Chinese delicacies to the world, the RMB 6 billion-revenue company proposed an ambitious revenue goal of RMB 100 billion with the new financial resources acquired from the public offering. Bestore expanded from its base market, Wuhan city, in central China to southern and eastern parts of the country. It opened flagship .....more

Since its introduction, in 2003, the Net Promoter System, which measures how consistently brands turn customers into advocates, has become the predominant customer success framework. But as its popularity grew, NPS started to be gamed and misused in ways that hurt its credibility. Unaudited, self-reported Net Promoter Scores undermined the usefulness of NPS. Over time its creator, Fred Reichheld, realized that the only way to correct this problem .....more

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands such as Allbirds, Casper, Peloton, and Warby Parker have creatively found a weakness in the marketing citadel of incumbent brands. By using data gleaned from daily interactions with customers, these brands have been able to adapt how they serve their unique customer communities across a start-to-finish purchase journey. The best of them have parlayed that ability into a profitable business model applied across multiple .....more

Chief marketing officers are vital to international expansion--if given the right authority and limits.

A series of studies looked at how to market visually "atypical" produce--and found that honesty was the best policy.

The Surface Hub 2S, a video-based collaboration device, had been initially designed for the corporate market. In late 2020, Jon Worsley, senior director of hardware program management at Microsoft, and Frank Buchholz, senior product marketing manager for Surface devices, were exploring a new opportunity in the higher-education market. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Zoom had established itself as the go-to software platform for livestreaming .....more

PittaRosso, a traditional Italian shoe retailer, is implementing an AI system to provide pricing and promotion recommendations. The system allows them to implement changes that would affect both the top of funnel and bottom of funnel activities for the company: once the objective function was defined, they could plan the season and choose which products to markdown and by how much, which additional promotions to apply and when, and how much to spend .....more