The document outlines the case study of Lee Lantz's journey as a marketer of chilean bass, detailing his initial challenges and eventual success driven by good marketing strategies, including effective naming and targeting chefs. It discusses the importance of expanding markets and learning from customer feedback to accelerate market acceptance. The second part of the document highlights communication issues between business and IT teams at Hefty Hardware, emphasizing the need for better alignment to create business value.

1. Mitchell Post
For our first unit's case study discussion board, we follow
Lee Lantz's journey as an exotic Toothfish supplier. Lantz
began this marketing adventure as a fish buyer traveling through
South America. During this time Lantz observed local fisherman
hauling a five foot long fish with teeth away from the docks.
Intrigued, Lantz bought a sample of the strange bass, and was
first turned away by its lack of any flavor. This was until Lantz
realized that this 'distasteful catch' could be a big hit for
consumers who disliked fish tasting products. Moving forward
with his business idea, Lantz's next step was naming his new
product. After bouncing ideas around, and even changing the
name he eventually settled on Chilean Bass; the exotic South
American toothed fish of the deep. After coining this name, our
fish sales entrepreneur sent samples of his stock to various
chefs; asking them to try his product in some of their high end
dishes. As a result of receiving semi-successful results, Lantz
then began supplying Chilean Bass to some wholesalers and
food distributers; specifically targeting the restaurant market.
This step of the process was paying the bills on time, but this
toothfish's real explosion in popularity came once its full
potential was realized by a fish stick company, and when
rewarded dish of the year.
To answer the first question, "Was Lantz just lucky? Or was
there good marketing along the way? If so, what was the good
marketing?" I will say that Lantz was lucky, but that it wasn't
entirely luck that got his product to where it is today. In my
opinion, Lantz was lucky for bumping into the local fisherman
carrying his fish, but after that point forward his success was a
direct result from his hard work and good marketing skills. In
this case study, I would agree that one of the best moves Lantz
made in marketing Chilean Bass was sending samples to chefs;
getting them interested or hooked on his product. This led to a
higher demand in his fish, which then resulted in wholesalers

2. buying and selling his product. Another good marketing move
was giving his fish a eye-catching name; one that sparks
interest.
In response to the second question, "The period of time
from Lantz’s first sale to Bon Appetit’s award was fourteen
years. How could he have used better marketing to accelerate
that process of unknown to popular?" I believe it could have
been entirely possible for Lantz to accelerate the growth of his
product through better marketing. One such way Lantz could've
accomplished this is by targeting a bigger market sooner. If you
remember, his fish was primarily sold in restaurants until a fish
stick company picked it up. If Lantz would've expanded his
target markets, and sent a sample to the fish stick company
easier; he may have made a break earlier.
Cheyenne Post
1. Was Lantz just lucky? Or was there good marketing along the
way? If so, what was the good marketing?
There was a pretty big combination of both luck and some good
marketing. His original Idea to call the fish something other
than "toothfish" was a good one, as well as to try and sell it to
upscale restaurants initially because of the lack of fish flavor.
He should however have stuck with the name cod instead of
bass. As the market he was aiming for was the cod market. He
got lucky in the fact that his fish ended up getting popularized
because of a distributor's choice and realization instead of his
own.
2. The period of time from Lantz’s first sale to Bon Appetit’s
award was fourteen years. How could he have used better
marketing to accelerate that process of unknown to popular?
First he could have focused on the entire market instead of just
aiming for the upscale ones once he realized that his original
plan was not working. He should have looked at where his
specific product fit into the market, and changed his
communication strategy to target those other areas. Perhaps
even being able to market it to upscale restaurants for the
specific purpose of being a fish without the fishy flavor,

3. promoting that it enhanced the sauces by not overpowering
them.
Secondly he should have looked for some publicity from any
source that he could have gotten, even a lesser known magazine
or the like could have gotten him noticed sooner, resulting in
moderate growth instead of having to wait on the explosive
growth that happened when his product was finally noticed by
Bon Appetit.
Lastly he could have traveled to the places where his fish was
selling to figure out what the restaurant owners and chef's did
like, and did not like about the product, so that he could figure
out how better to fix the problems or possibly how to market it
to other companies.
Directions
View the video in chapter 2 titled, Did you Know? (Links to an
external site.)and provide a few brief comments with respect to
its relevancy to this unit’s marketing concepts. llustrate how a
company may develop different value propositions for different
target markets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_aiE&feature=yo
utu.be&t=87
No required word limited
Mini Case
Delivering Business Value with
IT at Hefty Hardware2
“IT is a pain in the neck,” groused Cheryl
O’Shea, VP of retail marketing, as she
slipped into a seat at the table in the Hefty Hardware executive

4. dining room, next to
her colleagues. “It’s all technical mumbo-jumbo when they talk
to you and I still don’t
know if they have any idea about what we’re trying to
accomplish with our Savvy Store
program. I keep explaining that we have to improve the
customer experience and that
we need IT’s help to do this, but they keep talking about
infrastructure and bandwidth
and technical architecture, which is all their internal stuff and
doesn’t relate to what
we’re trying to do at all! They have so many processes and
reviews that I’m not sure
we’ll ever get this project off the ground unless we go outside
the company.”
“You’ve got that right,” agreed Glen Vogel, the
COO. “I really like my IT account
manager, Jenny Henderson. She sits in on all our strategy
meetings and seems to really
understand our business, but that’s about as far as it goes. By
the time we get a project
going, my staff are all complaining that the IT people don’t
even know some of our
basic business functions, like how our warehouses operate. It
takes so long to deliver
any sort of technology to the field, and when it doesn’t work the
way we want it to, they
just shrug and tell us to add it to the list for the next release!
Are we really getting value
for all of the millions that we pour into IT?”
“Well, I don’t think it’s as bad as you both seem to believe,”
added Michelle
Wright, the CFO. “My EA singsthe praises of
the help desk and the new ERP system

5. we put in last year. We can now close the books at month-end in
24 hours. Before that,
it took days. And I’ve seen the benchmarking reports on our
computer operations. We
are in the top quartile for reliability and cost-effectiveness for
all our hardware and
systems. I don’t think we could get IT any cheaper outside the
company.”
“You are talking ‘apples and oranges’ here,” said Glen. “On one
hand, you’re
saying that we’re getting good, cheap, reliable computer
operations and value for the
money we’re spending here. On the other hand, we don’t feel IT
is contributing to
creating new business value for Hefty. They’re really two
different things.”
“Yes, they are,” agreed Cheryl. “I’d even agree with you that
they do a pretty
good job of keeping our systems functioning and preventing
viruses and things. At
least we’ve never lost any data like some of our competitors.
But I don’t see how they’re
contributing to executing our business strategy. And surely in
this day and age with
increased competition, new technologies coming out all over the
place, and so many
changes in our economy, we should be able to get them to help
us be more flexible, not
less, and deliver new products and services to our customers
quickly!”
2 Smith, H. A., and J. D. McKeen. “Delivering
Business Value with IT at Hefty Hardware.”
#1-L10-1-001,

6. Queen’s School of Business, May 2010. Reproduced by
permission of Queen’s University, School of Business,
Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
98
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Delivering Business Value with IT at Hefty
Hardware 99
The conversation moved on then, but Glen was thoughtful as he
walked back to
his office after lunch. Truthfully, he only ever thought about IT
when it affected him and
his area. Like his other colleagues, he found most of his
communication with the depart-
ment, Jenny excepted, to be unintelligible, so he delegated it to
his subordinates, unless
it absolutely couldn’t be avoided. But Cheryl was right. IT was
becoming increasingly
important to how the company did its business. Although
Hefty’s success was built on
its excellent supply chain logistics and the assortment of
products in its stores, IT played
a huge role in this. And to implement Hefty’s new Savvy Store
strategy, IT would be
critical for ensuring that the products were there when a
customer wanted them and
that every store associate had the proper information to answer
customers’ questions.
In Europe, he knew from his travels, IT
was front and center in most cutting-

7. edge retail stores. It provided extensive self-service to improve
checkout; multichannel
access to information inside stores to enable customers to
browse an extended product
base and better support sales associates assisting customers; and
multimedia to engage
customers with extended product knowledge. Part of Hefty’s
new Savvy Store business
strategy was to copy some of these initiatives, hoping to become
the first retailer in
North America to completely integrate multimedia and digital
information into each of
its 1,000 stores. They’d spent months at the executive
committee meetings working out
this new strategic thrust—using information and multimedia to
improve the customer
experience in a variety of ways and to make it consistent in
each of their stores. Now,
they had to figure out exactly how to execute it, and IT was a
key player. The question
in Glen’s mind now was how could the business and IT work
together to deliver on this
vision, when IT was essentially operating in its own technical
world, which bore very
little relationship to the world of business?
Entering his office, with its panoramic view of
the downtowncore, Glen had an
idea. “Hefty’s stores operate in a different world than we do at
our head office. Wouldn’t
it be great to take some of our best IT folks out on the road so
they could see what it’s
really like in the field? What seems like a good idea here at
corporate doesn’t always
work out there, and we need to balance our corporate needs with
those of our store

8. operations.” He remembered going to one of Hefty’s smaller
stores in Moose River and
seeing how its managers had circumvented the company’s
stringent security protocols
by writing their passwords on Post-it notes stuck to the store’s
only computer terminal.
So, on his next trip to the field he decided he would take Jenny,
along with Cheryl
and the Marketing IT Relationship Manager, Paul Gutierez, and
maybe even invite the
CIO, Farzad Mohammed, and a couple of the IT architects. “It
would be good for them
to see what’s actually happening in the stores,” he reasoned.
“Maybe once they do, it
will help them understand what we’re trying to accomplish.”
A few days later, Glen’s e-mailed invitation had Farzad in a
quandary. “He wants
to take me and some of my top people—including you—on the
road two weeks from
now,” he complained to his chief architect, Sergei Grozny.
“Maybe I could spare Jenny
to go, since she’s Glen’s main contact, but we’re up to our
wazoos in alligators trying to
put together our strategic IT architecture so we can support
their Savvy Stores initiative
and half a dozen more ‘top priority’ projects. We’re supposed to
present our IT strategy
to the steering committee in three weeks!”
“And I need Paul to work with the architecture team over the
next couple of
weeks to review our plans and then to work with the master data
team to help them
outline their information strategy,” said Sergei. “If we don’t

9. have the infrastructure and
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100 Section I • Delivering Value with IT
integrated information in place there aren’t going to be any
‘Savvy Stores’! You can’t
send Paul and my core architects off on some boondoggle for a
whole week! They’ve all
seen a Hefty store. It’s not like they’re going to see anything
different.”
“You’re right,” agreed Farzad. “Glen’s just going to have to
understand that I can’t
send five of our top people into the field right now. Maybe in
six months after we’ve
finished this planning and budget cycle. We’ve got too much
work to do now. I’ll send
Jenny and maybe that new intern, Joyce Li, who we’re thinking
of hiring. She could use
some exposure to the business, and she’s not working on
anything critical. I’ll e-mail
Jenny and get her to set it up with Glen. She’s so great with
these business guys. I don’t
know how she does it, but she seems to really get them onside.”
Three hours later, Jenny Henderson arrived back from a
refreshing noontime
workout to find Farzad’s request in her priority
in-box. “Oh #*!#*@!” she swore. She
had a more finely nuanced understanding of the politics
involved in this situation, and
she was standing on a land mine for sure. Her business contacts

10. had all known about
the invitation, and she knew it was more than a simple request.
However, Farzad, hav-
ing been with the company for only eighteen months, might not
recognize the olive
branch that it represented, nor the problems that it would cause
if he turned down the
trip or if he sent a very junior staff member in his place. “I have
to speak with him about
this before I do anything,” she concluded, reaching for her
jacket.
But just as she swiveled around to go see Farzad, Paul Gutierez
appeared in her
doorway, looking furious. “Got a moment?” he asked and, not
waiting for her answer,
plunked himself down in her visitor’s chair. Jenny could almost
see the steam coming
out of his ears, and his face was beet red. Paul was a great
colleague, so mentally put-
ting the “pause” button on her own problems, Jenny replied,
“Sure, what’s up?”
“Well, I just got back from the new technology meeting between
marketing and
our R&Dguys, and it was just terrible!” he
moaned. I’ve been trying to get Cheryl and
her group to consider doing some experimentation with cell
phone promotions—you
know, using that new Japanese bar coding system. There are a
million things you can
do with mobile these days. So, she asked me to set up a
demonstration of the technol-
ogy and to have the R&Dguys explain what it might
do. At first, everyone was really
excited. They’d read about these things in magazines and

11. wanted to know more. But
our guys kept droning on about 3G and 4G technology and
different types of connec-
tivity and security and how the data move around and how we
have to model and
architect everything so it all fits together. They had the business
guys so confused we
never actually got talking about how the technology might be
used for marketing and
whether it was a good business idea. After about half an hour,
everyone just tuned out.
I tried to bring it back to the applications we could develop if
we just invested a little
in the mobile connectivity infrastructure, but by then we were
dead in the water. They
wouldn’t fund the project because they couldn’t see why
customers would want to use
mobile in our stores when we had perfectly good cash registers
and in-store kiosks!”
“I despair!” he said dramatically. “And you know what’s going
to happen don’t
you? In a year or so, when everyone else has got mobile apps,
they’re going to want
us to do something for them yesterday, and we’re going to have
to throw some sort of
stopgap technology in place to deal with it, and everyone’s
going to be complaining
that IT isn’t helping the business with what it needs!”
Jenny was sympathetic. “Been there, done that, and got the T-
shirt,” she laughed
wryly. “These tech guys are so brilliant, but they can’t ever
seem to connect what they
M06_MCKE0260_03_GE_C06.indd 100 12/3/14 8:38 PM

12. Delivering Business Value with IT at Hefty
Hardware 101
know to what the business thinks it needs. Sometimes, they’re
too farsighted and need
to just paint the next couple of steps of what could be done, not
the ‘flying around in
jetpacks vision.’ And sometimes I think they truly don’t
understand why the business
can’t see how these bits and bytes they’re talking about
translate into something that it
can use to make money.” She looked at her watch, and Paul got
the hint. He stood up.
“Thanks for letting me vent,” he said. “You’re a good listener.”
“I hope Farzad is,” she thought grimly as she headed down the
hall. “Or he’s
going to be out of here by Thanksgiving.” It was a sad truth that
CIOs seemed to turn
over every two years or so at Hefty. It
was almost predictable. A new CEO would
come
in, and the next thing you knew the CIO would be history. Or
the user satisfaction rate
would plummet, or there would be a major application crash, or
the executives would
complain about how much IT cost, or there would be an
expensive new system failure.
Whatever it was, IT would always get blamed, and the CIO
would be gone. “We have
some world-class people in IT,” she thought, “but everywhere
we go in the business, we
get a bad rap. And it’s not always our fault.”

13. She remembered the recent CIM project to produce a single
customer database for
all of Hefty’s divisions: hardware, clothing, sporting goods, and
credit. It had seemed
to be a straightforward project with lots of ROI, but the
infighting between the client
divisions had dragged the project (and the costs) out. No one
could agree about whose
version of the truth they should use, and the divisions had
assigned their most junior
people to it and insisted on numerous exceptions, workarounds,
and enhancements, all
of which had rendered the original business case useless. On top
of that, the company
had undergone a major restructuring in the middle of it, and a
lot of the major play-
ers had changed. “It would be a lot easier for us in IT if the
business would get its act
together about what it wants from IT,” she thought. But just as
quickly, she recognized
that this was probably an unrealistic goal. A more practical one
would be to find ways
for business and IT to work collaboratively at all levels. “We
each hold pieces of the
future picture of the business,” she mused. “We need to figure
out a better way to put
them together than simply trying to force them to fit.”
Knocking on Farzad’s door, she peeked into the window beside
it. He seemed
lost in thought but smiled when he saw her. “Jenny!” he
exclaimed. “I was just think-
ing about you and the e-mail I sent you. Have you done
anything about it yet?” When
she shook her head, he gave a sigh of relief. “I was just

14. rethinking my decision about
this trip, and I’d like your advice.” Jenny gave her own mental
sigh and stepped into
the office. “I think we have a problem with the business and we
need to fix it—fast,”
she said. “I’ve got some ideas, and what to do about the trip is
just part of them. Can
we talk?” Farzad nodded encouragingly and invited her to sit
down. “I agree with you,
and I’d like to hear what you have to say. We need to do things
differently around here,
and I think with your help we can. What did you have in mind?”
Discussion Questions
1. Overall, how effective is the partnership between IT and the
business at Hefty
Hardware? Identify the shortcomings of both IT and the
business.
2. Create a plan for how IT and the business can work
collaboratively to deliver the
Savvy Store program successfully.
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