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Interviewing the protagonist and collecting information from secondary resources such as company documents, company and competitor websites, industry reports and online databases like Euromonitor International.

The case explores the metamorphosis of JK Masale from a small-scale family business in India to a regional player. Over a period of six decades, JK Masale (JKM) has emerged against the backdrop of a fiercely competitive spice industry. India, being a confluence of varied regional cultures, poses a diverse consumption pattern. It varies to a great extent with respect to the specific food habits prevalent in each climatic zone of the country. While the brand had successfully captured the Eastern Market and the western market of the country, Mr. Vikash Jain, Managing Director of JK Masale, contemplated to venture in Southern India and introduce new product categories. The case delves into one of the major challenges faced by JKM over the brand architecture and labelling across product categories. Thus, the case provides an excellent opportunity for budding managers to: analyse the company’s performance in the backdrop of a dynamic competitive environment; understand the nature of strategic decision-making and its appropriateness for a small family-owned business; evaluate a brand amongst brands on the architectural framework and select appropriate brand architecture for new products; and understand applicability and risks associated with growth strategies.

The case study can be positioned in both undergraduate and postgraduate level programs for courses on marketing strategy and brand management. Primarily, this case would be ideal to discuss brand relationship and brand architecture in the given context. Instructors have an option to cover concepts like market structure, company analysis, growth strategies and emergent and deliberate strategy through the case.

The learning outcomes of the case are as follows:

1. Students will understand the interdependency of functional areas, such as operations, marketing, human resources (HR) and finance, in a manufacturing firm.

2. Students will analyze the conventional factory to focus on factory frameworks (Skinner, 1974).

3. Students will learn to analyze (associate) a company's performance reports (key performance indicators and profit and loss reports) with operations, marketing and sales functions.

4. Students will relate the concept of strategic resonance (Brown and Fai, 2006) to functional strategies.

Tariq Khattabi, a mechanical engineer with an MBA, joined Flexi Pack Dubai, UAE, as a general manager on 1 April 2019. During the recruitment interview, he learned that the company was struggling to maintain its breakeven point, and his first responsibility was to develop a strategy to ensure the growth of the organization. From the initial meetings with the production, finance and senior marketing managers, he identified problems related to the plant’s operations and sales. Although Flexi Pack enjoyed a good market reputation and profits, of late, the company needed help to make it profitable. Tariq's dilemma was to develop a strategy to put the organization back on the growth path.

He wondered whether the operations and marketing problems could be solved simultaneously. He had to present his strategic approach to the board within two weeks. Through this case study, management students can understand the interdependency of functional areas, such as operations, marketing, HR and finance. Students will learn the focused factory concept and a plant within a plant. They will be able to identify and appreciate dissonance and resonance between functional strategies and the importance of aligning functional strategies. Moreover, students will learn about consumer packaging types, material and their converting processes, which are the essential aspects of the fast-moving consumer goods business.

The target audience can be an Executive Program in Operations Management, BBA and Postgraduate Diploma in Management students who have opted for Operations Management or Operations Strategy as their major/minor specialization.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 11: Strategy.

To understand a firm’s service concept and process; to explain the service design that differentiates itself by making trade-offs in operations and service offering; to identify the importance of deliberately designed interrelated systems and resources to achieve growth in services and to evaluate the fit of new design elements in the service offering.

Ajay Takeaway Foods LLP (Ajay Foods) is a food venture founded by Mr Jaideep Solanki and Mr Ajay Solanki and operates as a chain of quick service restaurants with a simple mission to sell food that is good, affordable and accessible to all. Ajay Foods serves only pure vegetarian and limited variants of burger, pizza and cold coffee. Ajay Foods rolled out 75 stores in just 18 months during the COVID 19 pandemic. Ajay Foods’ founders were contemplating on expanding menu. There was growing demand for food items such as samosa, wraps, sandwiches and French fries. One of the founders got into dilemma: How many items? and Which item(s) to add to the menu?

This case can be used at post-graduate level to teach basic frameworks of service concept and design. The case covers a range of topics such as service processes, service elements and product offerings in a service setting. It can be used effectively with MBAs and Hospitality Management program in courses that focus on Service Management, Service Operations or Service Marketing Strategy.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 9: Operations and Logistics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the tourists' perception of smart tourism with the application of virtual reality and design a framework of smart tourism with elements of VR for Indian Tourism especially in the periods of the pandemic COVID-19. The ever-evolving and unprecedented COVID 19 situation had posed extreme challenges for the travel and tourism industry. In such conditions, it is becoming increasingly necessary to rely on digital technologies, ICT and smart tourism. ICT has served as a catalyst for innovations in tourism.

This study investigates the impact of smart tourism and virtual reality technology on the perception of tourists towards travelling decisions during and post COVID-19 scenario. The respondents involved in the study were tourists travelling in India, the tourists come from different parts of India. A structured questionnaire has been administered to collect data from 224 travellers across India. The questionnaire consisted 22 constructs. The constructs in this section were measured using a five-point Likert scale ranging. In the first step, the first order Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) is carried out, by using the software IBM AMOS-20. The initial model is generated ix constructs, and outcomes are used to analyse the model's goodness of fit and construct validity. In the second step, Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is carried out to do the path analysis of the proposed model. The effect of relationships amongst the theoretical constructs is also analysed using SEM.

The findings imply that the application of smart tourism along with virtual reality forms a positive perception of tourists and provides a sustainable platform for tourism organizations in Indian tourism. Virtual reality-based tourism has emerged as alternate for the tourism industry during the times of Covid, which in long run can be seen as a substitute to traditional tourism. The increasing use of blue ocean concepts, to delivery high-value experience at low cost has complimented the tourism industry. The researchers have made a modest attempt by proposing a blended model of smart tourism with virtual reality as a blue ocean strategy and which would ultimately facilitate the sustainability of the Industry by creating multi-dimensional values of experience for tourists in India.

The researchers have made a modest attempt by proposing a blended model of smart tourism with virtual reality as a blue ocean strategy, which would ultimately facilitate the industry's sustainability by creating multi-dimensional values of experience for tourists in India.

This qualitative study designs a smart tourism system with the use of the recent advances in ICT and Virtual Reality (VR), as a bridging solution and the saviour of the tourism sector in India during COVID 19. The integration of ICT into the travel experience has resulted in the social phenomena of smart tourism. This has led to a rise in use of smart tourism tools among tourism service providers.