25 Oct 2021

Seven INSEAD faculty among the Case Centre’s top 50 best-selling authors 2020-2021

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

Seven INSEAD professors are ranked in The Case Centre’s top 50 best-selling case authors of 2020/2021. The ranking is based on volume of sales from the preceding academic year, highlighting the enduring strength of their case work.

Professors of Strategy W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute and co-authors of the New York Times bestseller and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing - Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth (Hachette, 2017), and the global bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy (2005, Expanded Edition 2015) were ranked #4 for their cases featuring companies that seek out “blue oceans” of untapped market space rather than competing head-to-head with “red ocean” rivals. The iconic Blue Ocean Strategy is recognised as one of the most impactful strategy books ever written. With sales of over four million copies published in a record-breaking 46 languages, it is a bestseller across five continents. Rising in the rankings (from #6 in 2019), their top best-selling case The Marvel Way: Restoring a Blue Ocean 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 a decade by breaking the cost/value trade-off. Another best-seller, Salesforce.com: Creating a Blue Ocean in the B2B Space, describes a series of blue ocean strategic moves made by Salesforce.com in the CRM application market. In so doing it addresses any concerns of business executives about the applicability of blue ocean strategy in the B2B area.

Joerg Niessing, Senior Affiliate Professor of Marketing, was ranked #6 in the best-seller list. Among his best-selling cases is AccorHotels and the Digital Transformation: Enriching Experiences through Content Strategies along the Customer Journey, co-written with INSEAD Associate Professor David Dubois and INSEAD former PhD student Inyoung Chae, now an Assistant Professor at Emory University Goizueta Business School. It won The Case Centre's Marketing category award in 2018. Professor Niessing also authored waterdrop®: Changing the Paradigms of the Beverage Industry with Limited Resources and Digital Marketing, a company that disrupted the traditional beverage industry by creating a customer-centric culture, building a winning business model, applying digital technology at scale, and leveraging real-time data analytics. Since its launch, Waterdrop has grown by over 400% per year, with over 1.5 million satisfied customers. Joerg Niessing’s recent case How Corporates Co-innovate with Startups: The BMW Startup Garage is focused on the Venture Client (VCL) model used by established companies to leverage start-ups at scale to boost corporate innovation, and describes the success of the world’s first venture client unit (VCU), the BMW Startup Garage.

Wolfgang Ulaga, Senior Affiliate Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of INSEAD’s new Marketing & Sales Excellence Initiative (MSEI), is ranked #8 this year, rising from #10 last year with best-selling cases that focus on business model innovation and B2B Customer Solution Sales. His interests include value-based pricing and sales, customer experience (CX) design and service excellence, monetizing data through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and recurring revenue models in the subscription economy.

Wolfgang Ulaga’s top two cases are Michelin Fleet Solutions: From Selling Tires to Selling Kilometers and Procter & Gamble’s Tide Dry Cleaners (A): Leveraging the Brand to Provide a 'Wow' Experience. The latter centres on how the consumer-goods giant disrupted the US dry cleaning business with an innovative franchising concept. Part B Procter & Gamble’s Tide Dry Cleaners (B): Bringing the Guest Experience to Life with a Disruptive Business Model provides insights into the dry cleaning franchising business model and the subsidiary that runs it, Agile Pursuits Franchising Inc (APFI), underscoring the differences between P&G’s established corporate culture and APFI’s entrepreneurial culture.

David Dubois, Associate Professor of Marketing and the Cornelius Grupp Fellow in Digital Analytics for Consumer Behaviour, was ranked #17 in the 2020/2021 index up from #32. With a focus on how companies leverage big data to create sustainable competitive advantages from superior customer relationship-building. His best-selling cases, the case Ombre, Tie-Dye, Splat Hair: Trends of Fads? “Pull” and “Push” Social Media Strategies at L’Oréal Paris, describes effective use of big data from search and social media analytics into the marketing strategy of new product development strategies. His latest case, Shopee vs. Lazada: A battle of Titans for e-commerce supremacy in South-East Asia follows the rise of the small Singapore-based start-up from 2015 to what has become the most visited e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, turning parent company Sea Group into the region’s most valuable company.

Another best-seller, Digitally-powered Customer-centricity in the Industrial Gas Sector: The Air Liquide-Airgas Merger describes how Air Liquide - a leader in the industrial gas market - strategically prioritised technological investment to strengthen unique aspects of its relationships with different customer segments, including the steps taken to implement a new digital marketing organisation and a digital transformation. 

Pierre Chandon, The L'Oréal Chaired Professor of Marketing - Innovation and Creativity at INSEAD, is ranked #22 by the Case Centre in 2020/2021. His best-selling cases highlight how innovative marketing strategies can create value for companies. 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.

Another best-seller,  Can 3G Capital make Burger King Cool Again tells the story of Fernando Machado, an executive in the Unilever case, who is now Chief Marketing Officer of Burger King. It shows the challenges of redefining and rebranding a 60-year-old fast food giant, and how private equity, when it understands branding, can grow both the business and the brand at a fraction of the cost of traditional competitors. Chandon has previously won the Outstanding Contribution to the Case Method Award in 2016 and Outstanding Case Teacher Award in 2018.

Horacio Falcao, Professor of Management Practice at INSEAD is ranked #36 in this year’s ranking. Professor Falcao is the only creator of role-plays among the Top50 list. Unlike classic case studies, role-plays allow peer-to-peer interaction in the classroom. His best-seller Oxipouco: An Endangered Species Resource Negotiation (A&B)  is an ideal introductory negotiation role-play that raises issues such as negotiators’ assumptions, win-win vs win-lose, competition vs collaboration, interests vs positions, single- vs multi-issue negotiations, and positions vs options. It won The Case Centre’s Human Resource Management/Organisational Behaviour category award in 2017. In 2020, he won the EFMD Case-Writing Competition in the category “Women in Business” in 2020 with the role-play The Dual Career Negotiation (A&B), and The Case Centre award in the category “Entrepreneurship” with the negotiation Boost M6700 (A&B).