I am Professor of Marketing at Esade, co-founder of the school’s Institute for Data-Driven Decisions, and previously served as department chair. I completed my doctoral studies at Harvard Business School, and was on the faculty at London Business School before moving back to Barcelona.
I am co-author of the book The Ends Game: How Smart Companies Stop Selling Products and Start Delivering Value, MIT Press, which explores how modern technology stimulates accountability, challenging organizations to succeed from the quality of the outcomes they deliver rather than the offerings they bring to market. The remainder of my research, which for the most part lies at the interface of the economics and psychology of pricing decisions, appears in the leading scholarly journals for marketing science and magazines for management practice.
My coaching, speaking and advisory work similarly focus on the challenge of designing and implementing efficient pricing policies—the “back end” of an organisation’s relationship with its customers, if you will. Recently, I was named to the Thinkers50 Radar, a shortlist of the scholars “most likely to shape the future of how organisations are managed and led.” Prior to this, I was nominated for the Business Professor of the Year Award, a global competition of the Economist Intelligence Unit, and recognised by the Marketing Science Institute as one of the most promising scholars in the field.
I am Italian, but grew up in Australia and subsequently lived in Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom and now back in Spain.
Customers ultimately want to pay for meaningful outcomes, not the products and services that presumably deliver them. Today, companies can be increasingly accountable for those outcomes with three kinds of technologically-enhanced revenue models. Adopt one to better align your company’s success with your customers’ satisfaction.
Although there's ample research to guide marketers in naming new products, little of it has addressed follow-on offerings, even though these make up the bulk of new products in many industries. Companies have two basic strategies to choose from. They can stick with a name, often adding a sequential indicator (PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3), or they can come up with an entirely new name (Nintendo's Wii). Three questions managers should consider when deciding whether brand-name continuation or brand-name change is the best way to go for their next-generation product.
Elie Ofek, Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg, Elena Corsi and Emer Moloney
In 2020, the three cofounders of Holaluz, a newcomer to Spain’s electricity retail market, is preparing to launch a new offering: installing and managing solar panels on households' roofs at no extra cost for the consumer, who would still benefit from the energy savings stemming from the panels' production. Holaluz would fund the installations via a special purpose vehicle and use the surplus energy to power neighboring Holaluz clients at lower costs. There were many challenges in the new venture, like how to market the offering and if investors would buy into the new business. And what if Holaluz went a step further, got rid of all its tariff offerings and disrupted the market with a monthly "unlimited" flat rate for electricity consumption like telecom operators did with mobile phones bills? Was the market ready?
Ofek, Elie, Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg, Elena Corsi, and Emer Moloney. "Holaluz: Taking on the Spanish Energy Market." Harvard Business School Case 521-045, November 2020.
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