EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
THE COMPANY
Concept: Make and market red-tinted contact lenses for egg-laying chickens, altering their behavior so they will fight less, eat less, and produce more eggs -- increasing egg-ranch profitability
Projections: Eventual pretax net margins of 25%; 1989 sales of $329,000; 1992 sales of $24 million
Hurdles: Persuading historically conservative egg farmers, operating on thin margins, to risk money up front for an unproven product; sustaining the company in the face of slower-than-expected product acceptance; defending an easily copied product from competitors likely to enter after the market has been opened
Randy Wise's decision to sell contact lenses for chickens is not the result of a sudden impulse. He's been preparing for this since he was a teenager in California.
Back in the the early 1960s, his father, a chicken rancher, got involved with a similar venture. The idea then was to reduce the cannibalism of egg-laying chickens with a lens that distorted their vision. The business flopped, but the goal -- improving the economics of egg production -- is something Wise didn't stop thinking about.
At Harvard Business School during the early 1970s, he wrote a popular case study that evaluated his father's ill-fated experience and outlined the opportunity for a new company. It explored the economics of egg ranching and examined the options for marketing the new lenses. Even today, the case (which sells about 6,000 copies annually) is used in business schools all over the country to highlight pricing and marketing questions.
Wise hoped to launch the business right after business school, but he couldn't get the financing. "Investors had a hard time relating to egg production," he recalls. Fifteen years la...
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...ve done the same thing with chicken ranchers and convinced one or two of them to try the product. Their mistake was to think purely in economic terms. They said, "Here's an industry that needs our product because cost savings should automatically be embraced." They lost time.
In the best of times, egg production is a high-volume, low-margin business. As a group, farmers have been losing money over the past year. It's very difficult to take on new technology when you're squeezed. Farmers, for example, won't buy fertilizer when they're losing money, even though it's obvious that they should. But the industry should be recovering over the next 12 months. Animalens should be using this period to make sure the tests are done properly so that the credibility is there when the industry improves. If the tests confirm what they've been saying, I think they have a viable shot.
Once establishing themselves as a local milk provider, the Hatcher’s began producing and selling other local products as well. Besides selling a full line of milk products, the Hatchers sell butter, meat (beef and lamb), eggs, and
Even with FDA approval, the transgenic fish may face difficulty in getting consumers on board as it faces backlash with some grocers in the US reportedly saying they would not sell the genetically modified
Optical Distortion Inc. is a small new company, not yet in business, with a cash asset of $200,000 and a patent for an innovative new product (the only one) which is a contact lens designed to impair the eyesight of chickens. . These lenses are used instead of debeaking. Lensed chickens are more likely to survive. They also eat more efficiently than debeaked chickens. The key issue facing ODI is "How to market these lenses?". The analysis in this paper provides recommendations for ODI on their marketing and pricing strategy to launch this new product.
At the end of 1991, PepsiCo had EBITDA of $2.1 billion or operating profit margin of 10.8% - down from profit margins of 12.2% and 11.7% in 1990 and 1989, respectively. In addition, net sales only grew by 10.1% in 1991 – considerably low versus growth of 16.8% and 21.6% in 1990 and 1989, respectively. Recent acquisitions of Taco Bell franchises in 1988, bottling operations in 1989, Smiths Crisps Ltd. and Walkers Crisps Holding Ltd. in 1989, and Sabritas S.A. de C.V. in 1990 aided sales in growth in 1989 and 1990. Additionally, a joint venture with the Thomas J. Lipton Co. in 1991 to develop and market new tea-based beverages may lead to greater sales in the future. However, there is some need for an immediate return on its investments in order to sustain historical revenue growth and increase the current profit margins.
In Choice 1, there is a clear juxtaposition between the two images. On the left, a picture of a cheerful chicken with baby chicks is portrayed in gentle lighting and soft colours. There is a small symbol of a crow in the corner, associating the Crow Corporation with smiling animals. The people purchasing the food imagine its origin as just this, when in fact, revealed in the next image are chickens in inadequate conditions. Crow robots with red beaming eyes, injecting a chicken in dark, dull factory settings. The black and red colour scheme is one linked with villains, evil and black widow spiders. The mirage of carefree chickens is displayed when in actuality, the Crow Corporation is serving chemically infused poultry. This drastic juxtaposition
Animals are getting experimented on for products. Animals are getting affected everyday by this problem. They are getting experimented on to see if a product is safe for human beings to use. Medical schools in the United States have stopped using animals for their needs in training.(Driscoll and Finley) In 1983, 150 baboons had to be removed from the University of Pennsylvania Head Injury Clinic for brain damage. (Driscoll and Finley) People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Animal Liberation Front removed the baboons from the clinic. (Driscoll and Finley) The results of the experiments are not even that accurate. Nutrition experiments on animals are very inaccurate. PCRM published the article “An Examination of Animal Experiments” that stated “Nutrition is another area where animal experiments have raised repeated problems. While it is easy to feed vitamins, fat, or fiber to animals and to check whether their disease rates rise or fall, the relevance to humans is limited at best, due to major physiological differences between species.” People and organizations, such as PETA and the Humane Society of the United States(HSUS), have been...
Jane goes to work everyday at an animal-testing lab. She pours liquids used in eyeliner into the eyes of numerous albino rabbits. The rabbits' eyes are held open with clips so that for the 72 hour test period, the rabbits can't even blink. The rabbits' bodies are in a box so that only their head protrudes. Jane watches the rabbits and records how the rabbits’ eyes react. She observes as the rabbits’ eyes bleed intensely. Some eyes become extremely deteriorated, and some rabbits even become blind due to the toxicity of the liquid being tested. As she walks down the line writing down what each rabbit's reaction is, Jane notices many rabbits have broken their own necks trying to escape the horrendous pain ("Product...").
The company of Corning has gotten to the point of its popularity and run-of-the-mill house hold commonness not on pure luck alone but with a plan, a plan for innovation, and inspiration. This plan is known as Corning's Innovation Recipe; The Innovation Recipe was built upon the previous set of values dubbed Total Quality Management by the previous, now retired C.E.O James Houghton of thirteen years. He was much lauded as a great all inspiring man who at a time of great economic distress in which as Roger G. Ackerman puts it “ roughly half of the companies listed on the Fortune 500 fell by the wayside” or in layman's terms half of the big companies had gone bankrupt due to the recession at the time . The recipe is composed of five bullet points of guidance first of which is...
Daryl Buckmeister, CEO of The Chicken Coop, must decide whether to invest in market research, how much money to spend, and which programs to fund. His two vice presidents (of quality and marketing) have presented very different proposals.
Howard, Carol. "Alternative Testing Can Replace Animal Experimentation." AV Magazine CXIII (Spring 2005): 14-15. Rpt. in Animal Experimentation. Ed. Cindy Mur. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. At Issue. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 25 Apr. 2011.
...rogress for medical research. They have failed to show any progress with cancer research, and had been proven that more than half, 51.5%, of their research has been harmful to the human body (Hurley). It is not possible to have it both ways at this time. We cannot advocate animal welfare and at the same time give an animal untested drugs or disease, or slice them open to test a new surgical procedure (Derbyshire). Not everyone believes in the same thing and has their difference in opinions, but the facts have proven that animal testing is most defiantly not needed for medical research. The question asked before, Does animal experimentation really help advance medical research?, can only be answered with what the facts have proven. They have proven that animal experimentation does not help advance medical research, and animal experimentation should come to an end.
Raise your hand if you have any of these products in your household (visual). Raise your hand if you knew that in order for these brands to shelve their items, this is what they must do to animals in the name of safety (visual).
It has been almost four years since Jaqueline Traides teamed up with Lush Cosmetics to make the public aware of the cruelty of animal testing. Lush, a company that prides itself on not testing their products on animals or using animal ingredients, displayed a live action performance art on a typical day in their Regent Street store in London as a protest against the companies that still continue this process knowing there are other humane ways (Vrba, 1-2). Britain actually outlawed the testing of animals for cosmetics long before this event took place, but not without a fight; the cosmetics industry attempted multiple delays of the law going into effect in order to keep the testing in place, but eventually gave up (Vrba, 22-23). Inspired by
The first experiment was simple enough. 136 housewives from Palo Alto, California, picked randomly from a telephone directory, were chosen as test subjects and divided into four groups. Members of the first two groups received a call from an experimenter claiming to be a representative for the California Consumers’ Group. During the call, they were asked to participate in a survey regarding household soaps. This served as the “small request” with which researches would attempt to induce compliance to a larger request.
Heidi Roizen is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, current Venture Partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and member of the board of directors for five different companies (heidiroizen.com, 2014). While her merits alone are enough to justify the attention her name brings, her name is frequently mentioned for another reason – the Heidi Howard case. The Harvard Business School wrote a case study about entrepreneur Heidi Roizen consisting of an interview dialogue discussing her personal life and development as well as her professional success. Flynn (2005) took this case a step further by changing one simple thing, the name from Heidi to Howard. He found that while students r...