The case describes the hospitality brand Azulik which offers a unique luxury experience based on a set of contemporary values that resonate with the most demanding international consumers: connecting to art, nature and local communities. In the process of building the resort, a series of brands were created to fill the various needs of the guests staying at Azulik—restaurants, bar, spa, shops, museum… Vadim Grigoryan, the marketing consultant to Azulik, has been tasked to bring order to the portfolio of independent brands created, as managing the portfolio is expensive and inefficient, while at the same time failing to exploit the potential synergies that can be realized through a thoughtful brand architecture to create a clear, differentiated, and powerful offering to customers. The case puts students/participants in Vadim’s shoes and requires them to decode the Azulik brand and articulate the key values underpinning the brand’s identity, decide what role each of the independent brands should play, and whether and how these independent brands need to be connected to the Azulik master brand. The case thus offers the opportunity to understand all the decisions necessary in creating a powerful brand architecture as well as the frameworks to do so.

Janani – an affiliate of the U.S.-based NGO, DKT International – offered reproductive health products and services to mostly low-income consumers from its base in Patna, Bihar. It had grown tremendously in the recent past, expanding its coverage from 8 to 25 states — almost the whole of India. Donor funding had been critical to Janani’s success, but donors were scaling back their funding in India as the economy improved and incomes increased. Janani still had three donors but funding from two of the bigger donors was expiring in 2020 and ongoing support was not assured. While Janani had made efforts to become a sustainable social enterprise, in 2019, 40 percent of Janani’s annual budget continued to be dependent on donor funding. Janani needed to figure out how to become a self-sustained organization by embracing market opportunities and achieving its mission of improving the reproductive health of lower- and lower-middle-income consumers in India.

The case describes the story of Sri Lanka based Dilmah Ceylon Tea, a company founded in 1988 by  Merrill J. Fernando. The company had pioneered the concept of ‘single-origin tea’ to its latest innovative Elixir range. The premium positioned tea was ‘picked, perfected and packed’ at origin with a brand based on three pillars: taste, goodness, and purpose. Present in over 105 countries, it had become one of the most well-known Sri Lankan brands worldwide. The group invested a minimum 15% of its pre-tax profits in humanitarian and environmental initiatives through the MJF Charitable Foundation and Dilmah Conservation and Sustainability Unit (DCSU). However, the tea business was becoming increasingly competitive with the largest player, Unilever, about to sell its tea portfolio. The current CEO, Dilhan Fernando, needed to address several key questions, in this context: How could the Dilmah Ceylon Tea brand ensure the margins necessary to thrive and grow? Which customer segments and geographies should it focus on? Could it potentially leverage its investments in humanitarian and environmental initiatives to achieve better margins and

It’s been a long-standing interest of mine to understand how businesses can be a force for good. That desire stemmed from a conversation with a former classmate, a pioneer in social innovation, who cogently argued that there simply wasn’t enough money in the form of charitable giving to alleviate poverty on a global scale. Thus, the best way forward was for business to invest behind social innovation, also referred to as sustainability.
Kolo Nafaso – a new way of doing business in shea.

I was invited to give a talk at the executive committee meeting of AAK held in Singapore, in early 2018. In my conversations with senior sourcing representatives of AAK, I learned about the Kolo Nafaso programme and wanted to understand more deeply what AAK was doing in terms of creating a sustainable supply chain, working directly with the women from small-holder families in rural West Africa, who collected the shea kernels, the first link in the shea supply chain. My goal for learning more was threefold. First, there was my personal curiosity, the Kolo Nafaso programme seemed to be an interesting and meaningful initiative, that could impact poverty alleviation at scale. Second, I teach a class on strategies for social impact and profit, and this seemed to be an interesting example of just that, and I wanted to write a case study that I could use in my course. The third was that innovations like Kolo Nafaso pose challenges, since they require the balancing of two motivations: profit and social impact. They also require managing the differences in perspective across functions, within the organization. This hasn’t been studied in the management literature, and I saw an opportunity to contribute to the discussion of how to manage the balance by learning from the experience of AAK.

AAK, a Swedish company providing vegetable oils and fats for various industries for more than 140 years, has been a dominant player processing shea since the 1950s. In 2009 in Burkina Faso, AAK started a project to work directly with West African women with small farm holdings, to improve their productivity as well as pay them fair prices. This project evolved into an alternative supply chain. The shea nuts through this programme – called Kolo Nafaso – were traceable to the women’s group level in West Africa. Kept segregated, the shea was not blended with AAK’s conventional shea supply, such that clients could lay claim to having sustainable and traceable sourced shea, when using Kolo Nafaso shea in their products. This was becoming increasingly important, as focus on sustainability grew among end-consumers, employees, as well as investors. The Kolo Nafaso programme expanded to Ghana, as AAK realized the potential of this alternative supply source, especially in 2018 when there had been a global shortage of shea. The issue was how to significantly grow this alternative sourcing programme, and how to realize its value

Estimates suggest that four to five billion people live in poverty. Businesses engage with the base of the pyramid (BOP), typically through corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. Such efforts are laudable but are limited by their budgets. An alternative model would be to engage with the BOP as a sustainable business opportunity. The BOP can be customers as has been shown through the work of Unilever. The BOP also often own assets, such as small parcels of land or a few head of livestock. Likewise, the BOP has skills and labour. These can be sustainably leveraged to the betterment of the BOP. In this paper, I describe three initiatives that are profitably engaging with the poor as customers, providers of labour and providers of raw materials, while at the same time helping the target group lead better lives. Abstracting from these initiatives, I offer a framework for building profitable businesses at the BOP.

Inspired by CK Prahalad’s book on the “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” Novartis was exploring the possibility of building a sustainable business at the BOP in India. The goal was to create a business that would improve access to healthcare for the poor while being financially profitable, unlike Novartis’s traditional philanthropic and corporate social responsibility approaches. To successfully develop a sustainable business Novartis needed to answer a series of strategic questions: Which BOP patients were the best targets for reaching the social and financial goals of the program? Which diseases should the program cover, and with what types of products (patent protected, generics, OTC)? Which stages of the patient journey should the program address? Which stakeholders should be targeted? What communication channels should be used? What should be the program’s scale? Where to put the social business group in the Novartis organization?