Consumer goods

June 2023

Building an organisation for the ecosystem era: Weighing up the Recipe of Haier’s Internet of Food

By Michael Jacobides, Tom Albrighton, Monwei Chou, Lisa Duke, Dalbert Ma, Aryan Mittal

Ecosystems offer a new way to bring multiple firms together in order to deliver new value propositions. By working together, the hub firm and its complementors can create innovative ‘product plus service’ bundles that span traditionally separate industries to offer an experience that simply wasn...

June 2023

From Products to Experience Ecosystems: Haier’s Internet of Food

By Michael Jacobides, Lisa Duke, Dalbert Ma, Aryan Mittal

Haier had come a long way since Zhang Ruimin took it over as a failing Chinese Collective-Owned Enterprise in 1984. Since then, he’d been able to transform it into one of the world’s leading appliance manufacturers, known for quality and innovation. Haier was also noted for its bold geographical...

October 2020

Brand Value and Valuation – Technical Note (Spanish language)

By Nader Tavassoli

Brand valuation is the process of estimating the financial value of a brand. The valuation of brands as intangible assets emerged in the 1980s, when brands were first capitalized on post-M&A balance sheets. Brands are also valued for non-reporting purposes...

August 2021

Natura &Co: Sustainability at Scale

By Stefano Turconi, Pranjal Singh, Rui Wang

Established in 1969 as a cosmetics lab in the city of São Paulo, Natura grew briskly over the ensuing decades and by 2004 it had become Brazil’s largest beauty company. Unlike its competitors, Natura was built on the principle of reconciling socioecological sustainability with value creation. Dur...

September 2005

Red Bull: The anti-brand brand

By Nader Tavassoli, Nirmalya Kumar, Sophie Linguri

In 2004, Red Bull found itself at a crossroad, challenged with defending its 70% worldwide market share of the €2.5 billion energy drinks category that it had pioneered. Through a combination of buzz marketing tactics, decentralised distribution and sponsorship of extreme sports and pop culture ev...

October 2020

Brand Value and Valuation – Technical Note

By Nader Tavassoli

Brand valuation is the process of estimating the financial value of a brand. The valuation of brands as intangible assets emerged in the 1980s, when brands were first capitalized on post-M&A balance sheets. Brands are also valued for non-reporting purposes...

October 2020

The World Trade Organization and Tobacco Plain Packaging: Is Packaging Adverting and Does It Influence Consumption?

By Nader Tavassoli

On June 29, 2020, a dispute settlement panel convened by the World Trade Organization (WTO) rejected the appeal regarding its findings in the report “Australia – Certain Measures Concerning Trademarks, Geographical Indications and other Plain Packaging Requirements Applicable to Tobacco Products...

July 2020

Haier’s (2019) ecosystem revolution: From Rendanheyi 2.0 to Rendanheyi 3.0

By Michael Jacobides, Lisa Duke

2019 was an important year for Haier. Its new version of its radically decentralised structure, dubbed Rendanheyi 2.0, based on many independent ‘Ecosystem Micro-enterprise Communities’ (EMCs) had been devised to help it respond to the shifting ways of adding value in the digital, internet-based...

July 2020

Haier’s Rendanheyi 2.0: An ecosystem revolution

By Michael Jacobides, Lisa Duke

Haier in 1984 was a small, local firm on the verge of collapse, with poor-quality products and low morale. Within 30 years, it was transformed by Zhang Ruimin, who took over as CEO, into one of the worlds’ leading white-goods manufacturers, with a reputation for quality and innovation and an incre...

November 2019

BanaPads: To grow or not to grow? That is the question

By Luisa Alemany, Nicholas Andreou, Alma Gutierrez

In the summer of 2018, Richard Bbaale sat in a rural village in Uganda, looking over a banana plantation. He recalled the inspiration behind BanaPads as he contemplated what to do next. It had been 10 years since he had founded the non-governmental organisation (NGO) to help women and girls in rural...