Marketer's Showdown Case Overviews

1. Company: Vix Records: "Fidelity Freefall"

Topics: Ethics, technological environment, customer value

Case: Our international record company distributed millions of CD's with a new type of copy protection software on them to prevent piracy. After a short time there was a deluge of very public complaints that the 'protected' CD's were "spying" on the consumer's internet use, left them vulnerable to computer viruses, and did not provide any warning that such software would be installed automatically. After consumer and legal uproar, we have been forced to recall over two million CD's from retailers around the world, and are facing an ever-growing class action lawsuit. Consumers contend that beyond the illegality of the way the software behaved, that it also caused numerous security and virus risks that damaged their machines.

Strategy Issues:

• What strategies would you employ to:

o regain the loyalty of these customers and contain the incident?

o Continue combating the enormous piracy problem? This could go as it is more of a management issue.

o Reassert your reputation as an ethical and consumer-friendly company?

2. Company: Vix Records: "Coffee Bandwagon?"

Topics: Cross-marketing, promotions, channels, retailing

Case: An urban mobile coffee company has proposed to sell dual-branded compilation CD's of our artists from their fleet of trucks in exchange for the right to play pre-release hits over their PA system. We can significantly benefit from their top tier buzz, gain leverage and some new 'street cred', and tap into direct consumer sales in a new, non-mainstream venue with minimal financial cost. All research points to a profitable and positive result. The two main hurdles: our parent company insists that all cross-marketing initiatives are done with other sibling companies when possible - we have a sister company coffee chain but they happen to be pretty low-rent and on the fringe of our target market. Second we have numerous...