Alejandro Chernev - Mastering the Case Interview: The MBA Guide to Consulting, Marketing, and Management Case Analysis

THE MBA GUIDE TO CONSULTING, MARKETING
AND MANAGEMENT CASE ANALYSIS

ALEXANDER CHERNEV

Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

NINTH EDITION

No part of this publication may be recorded, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to Cerebellum Press, Inc., at .

While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

Mastering the Case Interview

Ninth Edition | October 2017

Copyright 20052017 by Alexander Chernev

www.CHERNEV.com

Published by Cerebellum Press, USA

Alexander Chernev is a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He holds a PhD in psychology from Sofia University and a second PhD in business administration from Duke University.

Dr. Chernev has written numerous articles focused on business strategy, brand management, consumer behavior, and marketing planning. His research has been published in the leading marketing journals and has been frequently quoted in the business and popular press, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, Associated Press, Forbes, and Business Week. He was ranked among the top ten most prolific scholars in the leading marketing journals by the Journal of Marketing and among the top five marketing faculty in the area of consumer behavior by a global survey of marketing faculty published by the Journal of Marketing Education.

Dr. Chernevs booksStrategic Marketing Management, Strategic Brand Management, and The Business Model: How to Develop New Products, Create Market Value, and Make the Competition Irrelevanthave been translated into multiple languages and are used in top business schools and by marketing executives around the world. He serves as an area editor for the Journal of Marketing and is on the editorial boards of leading research journals, including the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Journal of Marketing Behavior.

Dr. Chernev teaches marketing strategy, brand management, and behavioral decision theory in MBA, PhD, and executive education programs at the Kellogg School of Management. He has also taught in executive programs at INSEAD in France and Singapore, at the Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Switzerland, and at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has received numerous teaching awards, including the Chairs Core Course Teaching Award, Kellogg Faculty Impact Award, and the Top Professor Award from the Kellogg Executive MBA Program, which he has received nine times.

In addition to research and teaching, Dr. Chernev is an Academic Trustee of the Marketing Science Institute and advises companies around the world on issues of marketing strategy, brand management, consumer behavior, pricing, strategic planning, and new product development. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies on ways to reinvent their business models, develop new products, and gain competitive advantage. He is an early-stage investor and has helped multiple startups to uncover market opportunities, craft their business models, and implement their market strategies.

The most serious mistakes are not being
made as a result of wrong answers. The truly
dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions.

Peter Drucker, founder of
modern management theory

Y our success as a manager depends to a large degree on your ability to solve complex problems in a short time frame. Because no particular background or set of qualifications can guarantee that you possess that ability, recruiters have come to rely on cases to test your problem-solving skills under pressure.

Case interviews allow recruiters to examine your competence at solving a specific problem and to observe your thought processes, tolerance for ambiguity and data overload, poise, self-confidence, and communication skills. As an additional benefit, the interactive nature of the case interview adds a dynamic dimension to understanding your personality and allows better evaluation of your skills.

In a case interview, you are introduced to a problem and asked to offer a solution. The interview proceeds as an open dialogue between you and the interviewer in which your goal is to identify the source of the problem and recommend a solution. Despite its goal of producing a solution, the case interview is not about the solution per se; it is about how you arrive at that solution. Indeed, companies are not looking for applicants who have memorized a set of specific case solutions but rather for individuals who understand the logic underlying the solution and who can apply this logic to solving complex problems. They are more interested in your assumptions, the way you frame the problem, and the quality of your reasoning than in whether you arrive at the right answer.

This book will help you excel in mastering the relevant theories and frameworks and applying these theories and frameworks to solve the case at hand. Accordingly, this books contents are organized into two parts.

The first part, Mastering the Case Analysis, outlines a systematic approach to analyzing business problems commonly given in case interviews. It breaks down interview cases into five core typesopportunity analysis, market response, action planning, performance gap, and company expansionand offers a framework for solving each type of case. The discussion of case analysis is complemented by an overview of the relevant concepts and frameworks frequently used in case interviews.

The second part, The Interview Casebook, offers 20 in-depth case discussions that illustrate the interview process. Each interview is followed by a brief comment on the case type and/or the approach taken by the interviewee. The goal of these comments is to provide an overview of the interview discussion and to highlight certain aspects of the interview that merit attention. In addition to the case interviews and comments, each type of case is illustrated by an extensive number of case questions that function as a training ground for practice interviews. The questions are very diverse in nature and are designed to represent the spectrum of actual questions asked in case interviews. The combination of 20 detailed case interviews and 200 practice questions provides excellent background for developing a better understanding of how to handle case interviews.

Combining theory with practical exercises is important because it fuses two fundamental ways of gaining knowledge: learning by deduction and learning by induction. When it comes to preparing for case interviews, deductive learning involves understanding the basic principles of case analysis; this includes familiarizing yourself with the basic frameworks, principles, and methods used in case analysis. In deductive learning, knowledge precedes application. In contrast, inductive learning is learning by example. Here you learn the general rules from a set of specific examples. In this case, the basic principles are not given up front; instead they are derived from observing actual case interviews.