26 Oct 2020

Four INSEAD faculty members in the Case Centre's Top 10 best-selling case authors 2019-2020

The Case Centre , Best-sellers , Chandon , Dubois , Niessing , Mauborgne , Kim , Ulaga

The Case Centre released their Top 40 Best-selling Case Authors list, which in 2019/20 features four INSEAD faculty members in the top ten, and six overall! This year’s winners are Professors Renée Mauborgne & W. Chan Kim, 6th place; Pierre Chandon, 8th; Wolfgang Ulaga, 10th; Joerg Niessing, 16th; and David Dubois in 32nd.

INSEAD Professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne are Co-Directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute and are ranked the #1 Management Gurus in the World by Thinkers50.

Their top best-selling cases include the case The Marvel Way: Restoring a Blue Ocean which explains one of the greatest turnarounds in modern business history when Marvel Comics went from bankruptcy to a $4.2 billion sale to Disney in just over a decade by breaking the cost/value trade-off.

The two part case study of Cirque du Soleil, The Evolution of the Circus Industry (A) and Even a Clown Can Do It: Cirque du Soleil Recreates Live Entertainment (B) highlights the circuses’ ability to reinvent the industry and create a new market space by challenging conventional assumptions over circus entertainment and its audience.

The case Tata Nano's Execution Failure: How the People's Car Failed to Reshape the Auto Industry and Create New Growth reviews major BOS concepts, frameworks and tools in the course of analyzing the Tata Nano strategic move.

Visit this page to discover all cases from Blue Ocean Strategy Institute.

Pierre Chandon is ranked #8 by the Case Centre in 2020, up from #10 the last year. Pierre has previously won the Outstanding Contribution to the Case Method Award in 2016 and Outstanding Case Teacher Award in 2018. All Pierre Chandon’s best-selling cases come with innovative case websites, designed to offer a wide range of additional materials and inspiration to case teachers worldwide.

His case, Unilever in Brazil (1997-2007): Marketing Strategies for Low-Income Consumers, shows how Unilever approached marketing of detergent to the base of the pyramid. “The value of this case is to show that the basic principles of marketing, which is to make the effort to really understand your customer, can guide them to a solution even in a context—selling detergent to poor Brazilians who don’t own a washing machine—is totally foreign to them,” said Chandon.

The case Parfums Cacharel de l'Oréal 1997-2007: Decoding and Revitalizing a Classic Brand helps to discuss the value of the internal brand identity audits versus external surveys of brand image. It shows how understanding a brand’s identity can help charter the brand’s territory, guide new product launches, and help manage the creative process under lying advertising and product design.

Another Pierre’s case "L'Oréal in China" received the prestigious 2016 Overall Award Winner, all categories, of the Case Centre and was nominated Best Marketing case of by the CCMP in 2014.

Wolfgang Ulaga, Senior Affiliate Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, is ranked #10 this year rising 5 places in 12 months with best-selling cases that focus on business model innovation and alternative growth avenues in challenging economic environments.

Check his latest case “Lemonade: Delighting Insurance Customers with AI and Behavioural Economics - A Disruptive InsurTech Business Model for Outstanding Customer Experience and Cost-Effective Service Excellence” that Wolfgang co-wrote with Ziv Carmon, Dean of Research and Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, and Laura Heely, INSEAD Alumna (MBA, 2014).

Joerg Niessing appears in the list for the first time and he is ranked #16, being the highest new entry this year. “I am very honoured and delighted to be the highest new entry in this list as it demonstrates that my cases address relevant and important business problems”, says Joerg, noting that, "… cases are one of the most efficient and effective ways to teach my content. For my cases I identify organisations – like in my Telenor, BMW, Google or Accor Hotel cases – where I can deeply engage with key decision makers.”

His case “WeWork - Service Excellence through Business Model Innovation: Creating Outstanding Customer Experiences by Leveraging Data, Analytics and Digital Technologies” co-written with Wolfgang Ulaga allows discussion of customer-centricity in a B2B service context, and of how companies optimize the customer experiences by leveraging data and offers learning about service blueprinting and customer journey mapping.

Another of his top best-selling cases Telenor: Revolutionizing Retail Banking Services in Serbia - Digital Transformation of the Customer Experience analyses how one of the biggest international telecommunications providers, Telenor, has used this weakness of financial institutions and has successfully launched the first mobile only bank in Serbia – Telenor Banka. “The CEO of Telenor Banka is an INSEAD Alumni and is working with us on this case,” says the authors.

David Dubois closes the list of INSEAD representatives in the Case Centre Top 40 best-selling authors on the 32nd position. David boasts a wealth of accolades including being named 2017 Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute, and winning The Case Centre’s Marketing category award in both 2017 and 2018. Most recently, he has won the 2019 EFMD case competition for his case Digitally-powered Customer-centricity in the Industrial Gas Sector: The Air Liquide-Airgas Merger.

Another of his best-selling cases, Ombre, Tie-Dye, Splat Hair: Trends of Fads? “Pull” and “Push” Social Media Strategies at L’Oréal Paris, describes how companies leverage big data from search and social media analytics, integrate digital and social media insights into new product development strategies and thus successfully capture and create new value through pull and push dynamics.

The successful collaboration between Joerg Niessing and David Dubois bring to our case collection three best-sellers:

INSEAD is very proud of our authors achievements. Congratulations to them all!