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• Article | Harvard Business Review China | July 2020

  Lessons from Chinese Companies Response to COVID-19

  Das Narayandas, Vinay Hebar and Liangliang Li

  China was weeks ahead of the rest of the world in dealing with the pandemic and its fallout. To understand what's next, the authors conducted a series of 20 in-depth, in-person interviews, as well as a large-scale survey of more than 350 senior executives to ascertain the Chinese corporate world has adapted, innovated, and survived--and even thrived--in these extremely uncertain and trying times. They identified 11 lessons for leaders in the rest of the world.

  Keywords: Management; Innovation and Management; Asia;

  Citation:

  Narayandas, Das, Vinay Hebar, and Liangliang Li. "Lessons from Chinese Companies Response to COVID-19." Harvard Business Review China (July 2020), 118–125.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2018 (Revised March 2020)

  SAP: Branding in the Digital Age

  Das Narayandas and Amram Migdal

  By 2017, digital, social, and mobile technologies were rapidly changing the way many of SAP’s traditional customers did business over the last decade. In response to this trend, SAP had acquired companies with capabilities in e-commerce, human capital, workforce management, travel and expense management, and other areas. No longer able to rely on a single contact point through customers’ IT departments, SAP’s salesforce now had to target a variety of buyers including line-of-business managers and end users, who had a growing role in software purchase decisions. The case focuses on the changing role of SAP’s marketing function including its ability to (a) revamp SAP’s brand for the digital age to materially help sales reps when they approached buyers in the short and long term, (b) help SAP earn mindshare of prospects and customers by articulating unique points of view that informed and educated buyers who were increasingly moving online for research, insights, and thought leadership at a time when brand messages were increasingly being defined by advocacy groups and influencer communities, and (c) realistically demonstrate that recasting SAP’s branding as a leading-edge technology company would pay off.

  Keywords: brand positioning; Marketing; Sales; Brands and Branding; Strategy; Technology Industry;

  Citation:

  Narayandas, Das, and Amram Migdal. "SAP: Branding in the Digital Age." Harvard Business School Case 518-058, January 2018. (Revised March 2020.)  View Details

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• Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | February 2020

  Essential Explorations at MUJI

  Tomomichi Amano and Das Narayandas

  Launched as a private brand in 1980 to counter the increasingly brand-conscious consumer in Japan, MUJI offered beautifully designed, fairly priced, no-frills quality goods. The once modest private label brand with 40 products had expanded significantly by 2019 to more than 7,000 products with more than half its 975 stores outside its home market in Japan. It had even expanded into the service industry, opening hotels. President Matsuzaki of Ryohin Keikaku, MUJI’s operating company, was charged with reorganizing the product portfolio and prioritizing new initiatives, tasks complicated by the absence of a clear definition of “MUJI-ness,” the meaning of which had always been intentionally left open.

  Keywords: product portfolio management; Brands and Branding; Product; Management; Change Management; Mission and Purpose; Retail Industry; Japan;

  Citation:

  Amano, Tomomichi, and Das Narayandas. "Essential Explorations at MUJI." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 520-050, February 2020.  View Details

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