Case Collection

Marketing Walmart's Jetblack: Managing Luxury Service on Conversational Commerce
In 2018, Walmart, the world's biggest retailer, launched Jetblack, a concierge luxury shopping service that allowed consumers to explore and buy items via text message. It is a classic example of the danger of introducing a relatively luxurious brand into the portfolio of a non-luxury brand family. Jetblack's service combined artificial intelligence (AI) and the customized attention of trained experts to identify the most appropriate products for its customers. Following the launch of Jetblack, customer enrollments grew and both the frequency and breadth of member shopping increased. Its initial customers also stated that texting was their favorite aspect of the service. However, Jetblack's inability to scale its business operations proved to be a major challenge, with dire financial implications. By 2019, Jetblack was losing around USD 15,000 per customer annually. On February 21, 2020, Walmart announced that it was shutting down its exclusive concierge shopping startup, Jetblack, due to limited end user customer enrollments and inadequate investments.

Learning Objective

By working through the case and assignment questions, students will

comprehend the concept of conversational commerce

understand customer adoption of and resistance to conversational commerce

learn updated value typology linked with conversational commerce

understand the concept of luxury service

analyze the positioning of luxury services

learn brand strategy for luxury services

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Gaganpreet Singh,

Sanjit K Roy,

Kiran Pedada,

Laknath Jayasinghe

Published: Jan 10, 2021
₹399.00

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Marketing Margiotta Food & Wine: Customer Service through Service Robots

In 2018, high-end supermarket chain Margiotta Food & Wine (Margiotta) employed a robot named Fabio at one of its flagship stores to deliver in-store customer service. Founded in 1956, Margiotta retailed three product lines namely food, wine and 'local and organic' at their seven retail stores in Edinburgh, Scotland. However, within one week of its installation, Fabio was fired because of its inability to adequately deliver quality customer service. The customers developed a lot of resistance in accepting assistance from Fabio for their grocery shopping. The Fabio programmers, the Heriot-Watt University Interaction Lab, believe that a newer version of Fabio would be "crueller and more conniving" in delivering customer service. In the future therefore, Margiotta may very well have to take a decision on deploying a robot again. It would have to carve out strategies to proactively reduce customer resistance towards new version of Fabio, which eventually may ameliorate brand experience for Margiotta customers. In addition, Margiotta's employees were seen to have developed a state of positive emotion (love) towards Fabio. Employees were visibly disappointed when customer service through Fabio was discontinued. Hence, when the next version of Fabio is installed, Margiotta promoters would have to carefully manage employee emotions.

Learning Objective

The case is designed for use in a graduate-level marketing program, for courses in marketing management/service management and marketing of services courses. Customer service through robots Customer resistance towards service robots Conceptualisation of Robot Love using Theory of Parasocial Interaction and Anthromorpbism Robots and brand experience

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Sanjit K Roy,

Gaganpreet Singh,

Kiran Pedada,

Debapratim Purkayastha

Published: Dec 19, 2020

₹399.00

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Learning Objective

Learning Objective