Product Overview

ACME Birdseed Company (ACME) started as a top-quality birdseed company; but as its baby boomer customers age and retire, it has begun using lower-quality ingredients while expanding to a larger range of stores and geographical areas. While it is still the dominant player in the birdseed market, its profits have been dropping for the past two years, and Angela Baker, ACME’s founder and CEO, must make recommendations to its board of directors to increase shareholder confidence in the company. This cross-disciplinary case presents a fictional company dealing with many of the issues a real company faces. The primary focus is on strategy and the need to make tradeoffs, or to gauge acquired knowledge on any of these topic areas. It can also be used to discuss many other critical issues, including profit margin, marketing, customer segmentation, competition, supply chain, corporate social responsibility (CSR), regulation, entrepreneurship, and more.

Learning Objectives

1) To understand how a company originates and the vision of the founders. 2) To recognize that early success does not ensure long-term success. Innovation and strategic thinking are constant requirements. 3) To internalize that competition is relentless, as are other external influences and factors. 4) To develop an appreciation that strategy requires making difficult tradeoffs. There is not necessarily a right answer given the information available at any one time. 5) To provide a hands-on opportunity to work through an ambiguous, challenging problem with classmates (as colleagues) to solve a multidimensional set of issues.