Imaginarium

This case won the "EFMD Case Writing Competition 2004" Award in the category "Marketing".

In early March 2001, the president of Imaginarium was mulling over the main decisions he had to take regarding his company's commercial strategy. Imaginarium is a chain of 161 toy stores, of which 53 are its own, and 108 are franchised. Of these, 112 are in Spain and 49 are spread across nine other countries. The dilemmas for the commercial strategy are: 1) the chain's internationalization and development program; 2) the launch of a new web page offering the possibility of on-line sales, and 3) the related further development of Club Imaginarium. The company has almost 400,000 families registered as club members, but does not have anything like a loyalty card to allow it to determine, with any certainty, member-families' annual expenditure on toys. The company is considering the pros and cons of launching a loyalty card, and whether it should be an exclusive card, or a multi-client one such as Travel Club.