Browse

After a major-junior hockey team relocates to their city, the well-established Junior B Valley Brook Barons hockey team’s attendance dropped 30% to only 350 fans per game, leading to a financial loss for the season. For the team to break even again, their Business Manager believes they need to restore their per-game attendance back to 500 fans. Consequently, she wants to implement a new marketing plan before the next season begins. She recognizes the opportunity of targeting their current and potential new market segments. Despite the urgency, the team’s owner will only budget $5,000 to implement a new marketing plan. Students are required to conduct a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis, segment the market, analyze the five Ps of the marketing mix, pick one or more target markets, and develop marketing tactics that can be implemented on a very tight budget.

This case explores the complex process of developing a national calendar of marquee events for the Olympic sport of fencing. USA Fencing, the national governing body, must meet diverse stakeholders’ needs while balancing competing priorities. Chief among the tensions is maximizing organizational revenues to fund operations versus minimizing costs and barriers to event access for participants. Suitable venues are scarce and clustered in major metropolitan areas with restrictive calendars. The limited number of potential locations impedes USA Fencing’s ability to extract concessions from host cities and negotiate hotel room rebates and venue rental fees. This also limits USA Fencing’s ability to accommodate other stakeholder preferences, such as attractive locations and adhering to a recently adopted policy to give preference to locations in states with inclusive laws regulating women’s reproductive health and LGBTQIA+ issues. With no perfect solutions, navigating these constraints requires judicious analysis of alternatives and artful negotiation between attendee demands and organizational imperatives to develop event schedules aligning with USA Fencing’s mission. By wrestling with this multidimensional resource allocation dilemma, students sharpen analytic skills and strategic decision-making competencies, grappling with the same complex questions event directors face in real-world scheduling environments marked by inadequacy and compromise.

Lesley Johnson is the athletic director at Provincial University where a generous donation has recently been made to the Athletic Department to create an endowment to fund scholarships—called Athletic Financial Awards—at Provincial University. Lesley is tasked with devising the best plan to utilize these funds within the risk parameters established by Provincial University’s Board of Governors. Here, different investments are contemplated; however, with the guidance of Kelly Simpson, from Capital and Revenue Consultants, financial analyses to estimate returns, pricing, and risk factors for various fixed income options are completed.

The fans in Cincinnati are in an uproar. They have just witnessed another disappointing football season, the 23rd since Mike Brown became the owner of the team. Mike Brown’s tenure has been marked by historically poor performance with eight and nine straight game losing streaks to begin the season on multiple occasions. To make matters worse, this was the same number of seasons that his father and Hall of Famer, Paul Brown, owned the team. Where Paul Brown’s tenure had been marked by record ascendence to the playoffs and two Super Bowl trips, his son’s tenure was notable primarily for seasonal failure. In the minds of the fans and press, the two eras of ownership could not be more starkly different. Both are now calling for wholesale changes to the leadership or the sale of the team. Students should examine these claims and both eras of ownership using transformational and charismatic leadership theories, Collins’ Genius with a Thousand Helpers leadership model, and family-owned business succession perspectives. Do the fans and press have a right to be angry and demand a change in leadership?

Launched in 1986, the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Rookie Transition Program (RTP) is the longest running program of its kind in U.S. professional sports. Jointly administered by the NBA and National Basketball Players Association, the RTP is designed to ease the transition of first-year players to the league. Over the course of 4 days, RTP participants engage with current and former NBA players, coaches, administrators, and other league stakeholders on topics that range from personal finance, to mental health, to social justice advocacy. Organizational scholars might describe the NBA RTP as an element of the league’s onboarding, or organizational socialization, strategy. In this case, students will reflect on their own socialization experiences as organizational newcomers before analyzing the components of the NBA RTP. Finally, students will apply what they learn through this case to design the agenda of a future NBA RTP.