The EFMD Case Writing Competition celebrates outstanding case writing and teaching since 1988. Over the years, it has brought together educators from around the world who are committed to making management education more relevant, rigorous, and impactful.

We continue our 2025 interview series speaking with the authors behind the winning cases to learn more about their work, their motivation, and the stories behind their submissions.

We are pleased to feature Yajin Wang and Qiong Zhu, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), winners in the “Bringing Technology to Market” category.

The category “Bringing Technology to Market” is kindly sponsored by SMU (Singapore Management University). EFMD is grateful for their continued commitment to advancing case-based learning and supporting the Case Writing Competition.

‘From ODM to Consumer Brand: Keeson Incubating Softide’

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and provide an overview of the case you have written?

We are Professor Yajin Wang and case researcher Qiong Zhu from China Europe International Business School. Our case development work focuses on brand strategy, consumer behaviour, and how firms create and deliver consumer value.

The case, From ODM to Consumer Brand: Keeson Incubating Softide, examines how Keeson, a company with strong ODM, manufacturing, and product development capabilities, is building Softide as a consumer-facing smart bed brand. In brief, the case is not simply about launching a new product line. It asks whether the firm that has long succeeded by serving ToB customers can learn to understand real end ToC consumers, define a clear value proposition, and build trust.

2. Every case is built around a central tension that resists easy resolution. What is the tension at the heart of your case, and why does it matter?

The key tension is between the traditional strengths of an ODM business and the capabilities required to build a consumer brand.

For Keeson, it had built its success on strong engineering, manufacturing efficiency, cost control, and responsiveness to large ToB business customers. These were real advantages in the ODM business. But they did not automatically translate into consumer brand advantage. When Keeson entered the consumer market, the key question was no longer simply whether it could make a technologically advanced bed. It had to ask: who are the end customer, why do they need this product, why should they trust this brand, and what kind of service experience should follow?

This tension matters because many firms carry their exsiting sources of success into a new market, even when the new market requires a different operational logic. Softide’s challenge was not just to make the bed more “smart”, but to help consumers understand what that intelligence meant for their sleep health and quality of life.

3. What did writing this case reveal to you that you did not expect to find, and how has it influenced the way you think about your field?

What surprised us was that Softide’s path to differentiation did not lie simply in making a more advanced smart bed or spending more to educate the market. The deeper challenge was how to help consumers perceive the value behind the product.

At first, Softide looked like a hardware brand. Softide looked like a hardware brand. But if consumers saw it only as an expensive bed, it would be compared with other beds or smart mattresses on price and functions. The more we studied the case, the clearer it became that Softide’s real opportunity was to make consumers understand that the bed was an entry point to sleep-health management, connecting data, monitoring, alerts, and services.

This influenced the way we think about brand building in technology-enabled consumer markets. A brand is not built simply by giving a product a name or communicating its technical features more loudly. The harder task is to translate technology into value that consumers can perceive and understand. For Softide, the key question was not only how to sell a smart bed, but how to make consumers perceive the sleep-health value behind it.

4. What broader themes or concepts in management does your case illuminate, and why are they important for students to engage with today?

• It is a case about strategic focus. The company had to decide which brand to prioritise, which customers to serve, and which value proposition to commit to. Students need to see that strategy is not about keeping every option open; it is about making choices that align capabilities and brand positioning.
• It shows the difficulty of moving from technical capability to brand capability. Efficiency, technology, and supply-chain strength are important, but they are not sufficient for building a consumer brand.
• It highlights the challenge of positioning in an emerging category. When consumers do not clearly understand the difference between an electric bed, a smart bed, and a sleep-health solution, the brand must both educate the market and create a distinction.

5. If your case continues to be taught a decade from now, what do you believe it will say about the period in which it was written?

If the case is still taught ten years from now, I think it will capture a moment when competition was shifting from making better products to making products meaningful in consumers’ lives.

In the past, firms often asked: What can we make? Is our technology more advanced? Do our products have more functions? But this case reminds students that the more important questions are: Why would consumers care? How does this product fit into their lives? How can technology be understood and trusted by consumers? And, can the product enter a broader context of use, rather than remain a piece of hardware?

This is especially clear in Softide’s case. A bed was no longer merely furniture, and technology was not meaningful simply because it was advanced. The product had to be understood in relation to sleep, health, ageing, care, data, service, and quality of life.

I hope the case will remind future students that being consumer-centric is easy to claim but difficult to practice. The real question is whether consumers truly enter the firm’s decision-making process, in product development, service design and resource allocation. That, to me, is what this case says about the period in which it was written.

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The Sponsor’s Commentary

The category “Bringing Technology to Market” is kindly judged by SMU (Singapore Management University). EFMD deeply appreciates the invaluable expertise and the dedicated efforts of SMU in supporting the Case Writing Competition. Havovi Joshi, Director, Centre for Case Learning Excellence, SMU, tells us more about case writing and the winning case: 

1. Could you share a brief overview of your institution?

Singapore Management University (SMU) is Asia’s premier global city university with a mission to nurture a community of independent lifelong learners and change agents, enable world-class researchers to address societal challenges, harness partnerships to serve as a gateway between Asia and the world, and transform lives to create sustainable futures. Established in 2000, SMU’s mission is to generate leading-edge research with global impact and to produce broad-based, creative, and entrepreneurial leaders for the knowledge-based economy. SMU is known for its highly interactive and project-based learning pedagogy and is home to over 13,000 students across undergraduate, postgraduate professional and postgraduate research programmes.

SMU has a strong case-method tradition, and its Centre for Case Learning Excellence (CCX) develops and promotes teaching cases that connect real business decisions with classroom learning. SMU’s case collection includes about 500 cases that are distributed on Harvard Business Impact Education, The Case Centre and Case Centre Japan.

2. What qualities distinguish a truly great teaching case from a merely good one, in your view?

A truly great teaching case does more than present facts; it places students at a meaningful decision point, with a clear dilemma and sufficient narrative tension to provoke debate and reflection. A good case informs, while a great case consistently stimulates discussion, perspective-taking, and applied judgment.

At its best, a teaching case captures a real story in a way that allows students around the world to engage with authentic decisions, competing priorities, and complex contexts.

3. Why is sponsoring a case writing competition a meaningful way for your institution to contribute to management education?

CCX sees case writing as a bridge between academia and the business world, transforming real organisational situations into practical learning tools for students. Sponsoring the competition aligns with SMU’s broader aim of advancing management thinking in Asia through cases grounded in authentic business dilemmas and supported by strong teaching notes.

Through this sponsorship, SMU also seeks to strengthen the culture of experiential and discussion-based learning by encouraging the development of high-quality teaching cases that can enrich management education globally.

4. What does the winning case in your category reveal about the kind of thinking business schools should be cultivating in their students?

The winning case, ‘From ODM to Consumer Brand: Keeson Incubating Softide’ by Yajin Wang and Qiong Zhu of China Europe International Business School, in SMU’s sponsored EFMD category, “Bringing Technology to Market”, highlights the importance of cultivating critical thinking, analytical rigour, practical judgment, and effective decision-making skills.

The case challenges students to evaluate trade-offs, understand organisational constraints, and move beyond simplistic “either-or” thinking toward nuanced and implementable strategies. It reflects the kind of real-world complexity that business schools should prepare students to navigate in rapidly changing environments.

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About Sponsorship

EFMD Case Writing Competition is proud to have dedicated sponsors who drive management education towards impactful teaching and learning. Sponsoring a category allows you to showcase your institution’s expertise in the specific field of management education in the wide EFMD network. The choice of category, its exact definition and any specific conditions are the privileges of the sponsor. Sponsorships for the following categories are currently available: Continuous Improvement: the Journey to Excellence, and Finance and Banking. To find out more, please contact Petra Grestenbergerova at petra.grestenbergerova@efmdglobal.org.

More information about the 2025 EFMD Case Writing Competition winners can be found at the EFMD Case Writing Competition page. Please visit The Case Centre’s webpage to access the collection of the winning cases. See other interviews from this series.