A business case study is a detailed study that you read, which tells you more about a company or something that happened to a company in the past. When you enroll in business school, you can look forward to reading these cases nearly every day that you have a class, and being required to write some of your own. You may want to look at some of the more popular case studies before or after enrolling too.
Blockbuster
Depending on your age, you may remember the days when you could stop by a Blockbuster and rent a few movies for the night. As streaming devices became more popular, Blockbuster took too long to catch up to the competition and ultimately failed. While there are still some stores with its name around, those are franchise stores. You can look at how its business model failed or the connection that Blockbuster had to Netflix. The founders of Netflix originally offered Blockbuster the chance to purchase the company, but Blockbuster turned down the offer because it didn’t think streaming would be very popular.
Excite
Another blast from the past is Excite, a tech company that was once one of the largest search engines in the world. During its early days, Excite purchased a number of other tech and search engine companies and absorbed those companies. The founders of Google took their idea to Excite and asked for $1 million, which was less than it paid for other companies at the time. When Excite turned them down, they came back with a counter offer of $250,000, which Excite still turned down. Few people remember Excite today, but nearly everyone knows Google.
Kodak
Kodak went from being one of the top camera manufacturers in the world to a company that almost doesn’t exist today. Those working for the company created a digital camera back in 1977 and even applied for a patent on the design. The high sell price of the camera led to the company ignoring the idea and focusing on traditional cameras. Even after the first digital cameras hit the market, Kodak still assumed it was a passing fad. Though it did try to catch up and released a few models, it was too little and too late.
New Coke
Coca-Cola and Pepsi were two of the biggest names in the soda world in the 1980s. Though Coca-Cola had more customers and more sales, it noticed that Pepsi sales were slowly climbing. After finding that some customers preferred the taste of Pepsi, which was much sweeter, Coca-Cola decided to pull its main soda off the market and replace it with New Coke. New Coke was such as huge failure that the company pulled it off store shelves and brought back the original formula, which is called Coca-Cola Classic, within a year.
Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream
According to Business Insider, one business case study that all students should learn about involves Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream. After its contract with Ben & Jerry’s ended, the company went through a number of changes that might cause another business to fail. Instead of letting workers hear about those changes through the media and letting rumors fly, reps from the company traveled all across the country and sat down with workers to explain everything to them, which helped build loyalty within the company.
Case studies are an excellent resource for business students. You can learn about failures that led to companies shutting down and successes that helped companies grow. When you enroll in business school, you can read the business case study that a professor gives you and read cases relating to top companies like Google and Coca-Cola.
