A few months ago, a men's suit jacket appeared on my doorstep. What I had actually ordered was a pink dress. I emailed the retailer, and thus began a weeks-long back-and-forth involving photos of the jacket, photos of tags, and check-ins with customer-service representatives. For the first time in my online-shopping life, I was facing a truly inconvenient return process. The company, it seemed, was going to great lengths to ensure I wasn't trying to defraud them. After enjoying years of easy and free returns as the norm of online shopping, I was surprised by this experience. But perhaps I shouldn't have been: Retailers, dealing with the high costs of rampant returns since the start of the pandemic, plus a growing problem of return fraud, have begun to issue stricter, sometimes byzantine, return policies and processes over the past few years. You can return that shirt, an e-commerce site might say, but only within a 14-day window, or only for store credit. Yes, you can bring back that toaster, but you'll need to deliver it to a local shop'a practice that's known in industry terms as BORIS, or 'buy online, return in store.'...
A conversation with Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jill Avery on the role marketing plays in scaling a business....
Juicyway is an African fintech that's leveraging stablecoin technology to power fast and cheap cross-border payments. The company launched out of stealth after processing over $1 billion in transaction volume for thousands of African businesses over the last three years. The company claims to have processed over 25,000 transactions, generating $1.3 billion in total payment volume from 4,000 users. According to its founders, Juicyway racked up these numbers with no publicly available app or marketing efforts ' and instead relied heavily on word-of-mouth referrals. One customer type for a cross-border payments platform would be a remittance business, but Juicyway is representative of a new wave of platforms powered by stablecoin technology that challenges the conventional methods across developed and emerging markets. CarDekho SEA raised $60 million in equity, valuing the company at over $300 million. It's the company's first round of external funding, following a previous $40 million investment from parent company CarDekho Group....
Today's business leaders recognize transformation as the courageous choice required to deliver an ambitious business agenda. As we reported earlier this year, companies pursue transformation to reset the business, venture into areas of greater ambition, deliver bold growth, enable operating-model change, build new and competitive capabilities, and evolve their culture in ways that can set them apart from competitors. This article is a collaborative effort by Drew Goldstein, Louisa Greco, Rebecca Doherty, Sandra Sancier-Sultan, and Yolanda Zonno, with Preeya Mody, representing views from McKinsey's Transformation, Strategy and Corporate Finance, and Growth, Marketing & Sales Practices. What is transformation' We define it as a process that begins with a bold ambition'supported by a fact base and informed by an external lens'driving strategic choices that fundamentally change how an organization operates to realize significant improvements in performance, including innovation and growth. A holistic transformation agenda, including transforming for growth, enables separation from peers....
