Your client is Italian Beauty Company (IBC), a high quality beauty products company. It is well established in Italy.
One of their major product lines is high quality home hair-color kits. They manufacture these products in-house and sell it through retail outlets and drugstores.
Recently their market share has declined. Their competitor Cosmetica INT. has also become more popular.
IBC would like your firm’s advice.
Since this is an interviewer-led case, the interviewer should guide the candidate through the interview.
There are two parts to this case.
The first part is more qualitative. The open-ended questions should prompt the interviewee to think about the problem and its solution.
The second part is more quantitative in nature. In order to solve the questions, the interviewee should perform calculations.
The questions in the big boxes should be read out to the interviewee.
Since this is a very open question, there are a number of ways to approach it.
A good interviewee will mention the following aspects:
1. Product
2. Customer
3. Distribution channel
Some suggestions:
Suggested case structure:
First we should have a look at the current market situation:
The interviewee should calculate the current and future market share.
Current market
= 0.5 * $400 m+ 0.1 * $100 m + 0.25 * $50 m
= $222.5 m
Future market in two years
If we assume the current market share trends hold for women, men and teeneagers, the following sales will be the result:
Future market share
Market share change = 0.297 - 0.4045 = -0.1075
If the current market share trends hold, IBC will lose about 10.75% in market share over the next two years.
Information that can be shared on the interviewee’s inquiry:
A good recommendation will include the following statements:
We should first further segment the men’s segment, according to different needs.
Then, we should target these segments by advertising channel.
In order to successfully target both men and women together, we must further segment the women’s segment. Then, we need to find advertising channels that can reach both segments. The advertised content must fulfill the needs of both segments.
If the interviewee solves the case very quickly, you can come up with more challenging questions to ask them.
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