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• Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2020

  Pricing at Netflix

  Elie Ofek, Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg and Amy Klopfenstein

  Since its launch in 1998 as “the Amazon.com of DVDs,” Netflix had evolved from a DVD rental company to a video streaming platform and producer of original films and television shows. As the company matured, it regularly increased prices and adjusted its product offerings while continuing to add new subscribers. However, between late 2019 and mid-2020, competition within the streaming industry intensified with the launch of new entrants such as Disney+, Apple TV+, and HBO Max, jeopardizing Netflix’s position as the industry leader. In spite of the heightened competition in the streaming industry, some analysts and customer willingness-to-pay surveys suggested that Netflix had the opportunity to implement another rate hike in the near future. By May 2020, Netflix must decide whether to increase prices again, or whether it should consider a different pricing model altogether.

  Keywords: Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Entertainment; Film Entertainment; Television Entertainment; Finance; Strategy; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Business Strategy; Adaptation; Technology; Internet; Online Technology; Technology Platform; Customers; Customer Satisfaction; Customer Value and Value Chain; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; North and Central America; United States;

  Citation:

  Ofek, Elie, Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg, and Amy Klopfenstein. "Pricing at Netflix." Harvard Business School Case 521-004, July 2020.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2020

  Pattern Brands

  Sunil Gupta, Elie Ofek and Julia Kelley

  In March 2020, direct-to-consumer (DTC) company Pattern Brands needed to decide how to allocate resources across its different brands. Pattern Co-Founders Nick Ling and Emmett Shine hoped to avoid the pitfalls faced by some DTC companies—such as inability to scale and lack of competitive differentiation—by relying on their previous experience running a successful branding and marketing agency. Rather than focusing on a single brand, they conceived Pattern as a “DTC 2.0” model—a portfolio of 5 to 10 brands that shared a common theme of activities related to the home and a common mission of helping millennials enjoy daily life. Since its founding in August 2019, Pattern had launched cookware brand Equal Parts and home organization brand Open Spaces. Although Pattern’s team still believed strongly in the benefits of a multi-brand strategy, Open Spaces’ sales and unit economics had significantly outperformed Equal Parts’ to date. Pattern’s leadership wanted to build on Open Spaces’ early momentum with new product colors and product lines, but they debated whether to act on the results of a recent customer survey indicating a positive response to an Equal Parts product redesign. Ling and Shine now had several decisions to consider. How should they allocate resources between repositioning Equal Parts and continuing to grow Open Spaces? How and when should they continue building Pattern’s portfolio by developing a third brand? How much should they invest in marketing parent brand Pattern? More broadly, did Pattern’s model represent the future of DTC brands?

  Keywords: Brands and Branding; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Business Model; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Demand and Consumers; Business Strategy; Diversification; Competitive Advantage; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry; North and Central America; United States; New York (city, NY); New York (state, US);

  Citation:

  Gupta, Sunil, Elie Ofek, and Julia Kelley. "Pattern Brands." Harvard Business School Case 521-009, July 2020.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2020

  Vanguard Retail Operations (A)

  Willy C. Shih and Antonio Moreno

  The first two cases in this series are set in the financial services industry, and explore whether it is better for back-office workers to be generalists who provide the flexibility of being able to handle the complete range of transactions that the company faces or specialists who focus on a subset of the overall transaction mix. The objective is to introduce the advantages of demand pooling in reducing the variability associated with the forecasting of highly variable workloads, while also demonstrating the benefits to worker learning and efficiency improvements that can come from specialization.
  
  The case is set at the Retail Investor Group Operations of the Vanguard Group, the mutual funds and ETF giant. Karin Risi, the managing director, is faced with a back-office operation that hasn’t kept up with massive transaction growth, one that is struggling under the weight of mounting client phone call and transaction volumes, client complaints, and buckling employee morale. And worse, the press was taking notice. The (A) case details the complexity in the growing backlog and frames the question of whether they should pursue a specialist model. The (B) case, for distribution in class, details the impact of an initial segmentation of workload into eight categories and poses additional questions for class discussion and analysis.

  Keywords: pooling; generalist model; specialist model; Operations; Service Operations; Management; Financial Services Industry; United States;

  Citation:

  Shih, Willy C., and Antonio Moreno. "Vanguard Retail Operations (A)." Harvard Business School Case 620-104, June 2020.  View Details

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