management blog

Bit of an experiment today. I’ve asked two groups of MBA students – one from London Business School, the other from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business – to discuss a case study that I’ve put together. It examines Cains Beer, a Liverpool-based brewer that has aspirations of graduating from being a regional brand to a national brand.

The idea is that the students watch a 5-minute video and read an article outlining this particular example of a textbook marketing challenge (both are contained in the second half of this post). Between 5.45pm and 7.15pm London time today, they will then publish their analysis of the situation in the comments section of this post, creating a rolling online debate.

My hope is that it will help anyone contemplating doing an MBA to get an insight into how business school students dissect such case studies. For the MBA students themselves, it’s a chance to interact with peers at another school. Finally, it may also yield some useful tips for the Dusanj brothers, the entrepreneurs who own Cains, or for other business people facing the same marketing challenge. That’s the theory anyway!

If you click here, you’ll pull up a written case study with more detail about Cains marketing strategy so far and the questions it faces. Further (optional) background info can be found in Cains’ latest annual report and in the admission document it filed when it listed on the London Stock Exchange through a reverse takeover in 2007.

For the 90-minute duration of the initial online debate, I’d like to restrict comments to the Chicago and London MBA students who kindly agreed to take part in this pilot. That means I’ll temporarily remove any other comments until the end of the session. But after 7.15pm, I’d be delighted if others – particularly MBA students from other schools – volunteered their own opinions.

And now I’ll just open the floor…