Case: USA Today

As the entire newspaper industry sits on the brink of collapse, Gannett and USA Today work to avoid disaster and transform the nation's most read newspaper into tomorrow's best resource for news and information. In the face of continual competition across a variety of media sources, the future of USA Today depends on its ability to continually push the envelope of innovation and offer value-added, proprietary content to ensure continued differentiation and the future of the USA Today brand.

1. What opportunities and challenges in today's economy have affected and are still affecting USA Today?

2. How has USA Today been able to differentiate itself and stay away from the commodity status of most news sources?

3. As the Chief Marketing Officer for USA Today, your boss asks you to develop a plan that allows readers to fully customize their online newspaper and have audio/video content automatically sent to their mobile devices. How would you go about developing a strategy to achieve this goal?

Case: Mattel

As a global leader in toy manufacturing and marketing, Mattel faces a number of potential threats to its ongoing operations including tough competition, changing consumer preferences and lifestyles, lawsuits, product liability issues, global sourcing, and declining sales. The case addresses Mattel's social responsibility imperative along with the company's reactions to its challenges and its prospects for the future.

1. What environmental issues are responsible for Barbie's declining sales? How have these issues also affected other parts of Mattel's product portfolio?

2. Although Mattel conducts strategic planning from a customer point of view, the company still suffered from a serious product recall issue. Why does customer-focused strategic planning not always prevent issues like this from occurring?

3. Assume you are the marketing director for one of Mattel's core brands. Upper management is interested in exploring more technologically advanced and interactive toys within your core brand. How would you approach this process? How will Mattel's past failures with interactive toys cloud your decision-making process?

Each part would need to be a minimum of 250 words.

At least two external scholarly sources on the analysis topics must be included and cited for each individual question