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- October 2024
- Article
Canary Categories
By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester
Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “canary categories” for which the reverse is true. Purchases in these categories are a signal that customers are less likely to return to that... View Details
Keywords: Churn; Churn Management; Churn/retention; Assortment Planning; Retail; Retailing; Retailing Industry; Preference Heterogeneity; Assortment Optimization; Customers; Retention; Consumer Behavior; Forecasting and Prediction; Retail Industry
Anderson, Eric, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli, and Duncan Simester. "Canary Categories." Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) 61, no. 5 (October 2024): 872–890.
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Operational Impact of Customer Location in On-Demand Services
By: Natalie Epstein, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
The rapid growth of on-demand delivery services, particularly in the food and grocery sectors, has driven the expansion of hyperlocal fulfillment centers (FCs). This paper uses data from an on-demand grocery delivery platform in Latin America to assess how customer... View Details
- July 2024 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Dynamic Pricing at Wendy’s: Where’s the Beef?
By: Elie Ofek, Alicia Dadlani and Martha Hostetter
In early 2024, Wendy’s new CEO announced on an earnings call that the company would install digital menus in its US locations so it could begin testing dynamic pricing—changing prices up or down in response to shifts in supply and demand – as well as allow engaging in... View Details
- July–August 2024
- Article
Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response,
which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment
effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details
Keywords: Long-run Targeting; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Statistical Surrogacy; Customer Churn; Field Experiments; Consumer Behavior; Customer Focus and Relationships; AI and Machine Learning; Marketing Strategy
Huang, Ta-Wei, and Eva Ascarza. "Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals." Marketing Science 43, no. 4 (July–August 2024): 863–884.
- June 2024
- Case
SnapTravel: Betting on 'Super.com'
By: Reza Satchu and Tom Quinn
This case explores SnapTravel, a travel startup offering discounted hotel rooms, and its founders’ desire to pivot to a “super app” that saved customers money across many different purchase types. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hussein Fazal and Henry Shi saw SnapTravel... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Plan; Business Startups; Change Management; Disruption; Transformation; Volatility; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Decisions; Income; Entrepreneurship; Geographic Scope; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Health Pandemics; Surveys; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Leading Change; Crisis Management; Goals and Objectives; Risk Management; Consumer Behavior; Game Theory; Risk and Uncertainty; Adaptation; Diversification; Expansion; System Shocks; Accommodations Industry; Technology Industry; Canada; United States; Las Vegas
- April 8, 2024
- Article
Loyalty Programs May Limit Competition, and They Could Be Pushing Prices up for Everyone
By: Alexandru Nichifor and Scott Duke Kominers
Keywords: Customer Focus and Relationships; Competitive Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Brands and Branding
Nichifor, Alexandru, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Loyalty Programs May Limit Competition, and They Could Be Pushing Prices up for Everyone." The Conversation (April 8, 2024).
- April 2024
- Article
Detecting Routines: Applications to Ridesharing CRM
By: Ryan Dew, Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Nachum Sicherman
Routines shape many aspects of day-to-day consumption. While prior work has established the importance of habits in consumer behavior, little work has been done to understand the implications of routines—which we define as repeated behaviors with recurring, temporal... View Details
Keywords: Ride-sharing; Routine; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Consumer Behavior; Segmentation
Dew, Ryan, Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer, and Nachum Sicherman. "Detecting Routines: Applications to Ridesharing CRM." Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) 61, no. 2 (April 2024): 368–392.
- March–April 2024
- Article
Retailers and Health Systems Can Improve Care Together
By: Robert S. Huckman, Vivian S. Lee and Bradley R Staats
Health systems are struggling to address the many shortcomings of health care delivery: rapidly growing costs, inconsistent quality, and inadequate and unequal access to primary and other types of care. However, if retailers and health systems were to form strong... View Details
Keywords: Health Care; Retail; Retailers; Consumer; Health Care and Treatment; Value; Consumer Behavior; Business Model; Partners and Partnerships; Health Industry; Retail Industry; United States
Huckman, Robert S., Vivian S. Lee, and Bradley R Staats. "Retailers and Health Systems Can Improve Care Together." Harvard Business Review 102, no. 2 (March–April 2024): 120–127.
- March 7, 2024
- Article
Integrating Digital Tools into Every Stage of Your Sales Strategy
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Georg Krentzel
In their growth and customer-acquisition activities, most companies now face twin challenges: understanding and responding to omni-channel buying behavior and doing that without inadvertently decreasing sales productivity. Thirty years ago, Peter Drucker noted that... View Details
Keywords: Sales Management; Digital Tools; Sales; Marketing Channels; Technology Adoption; Brands and Branding
Cespedes, Frank V., and Georg Krentzel. "Integrating Digital Tools into Every Stage of Your Sales Strategy." Harvard Business Review (website) (March 7, 2024).
- February 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Teaching Note
Travelogo: Understanding Customer Journeys
By: Eva Ascarza and Ta-Wei Huang
Teaching Note for HBS Exercise 524-044. The exercise aims to teach students about 1) Customer Segmentation; and 2) constructing buying personas, 3) Get actionable insights from clickstream data. View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Platform Information Provision and Consumer Search: A Field Experiment
By: Lu Fang, Yanyou Chen, Chiara Farronato, Zhe Yuan and Yitong Wang
Despite substantial efforts to help consumers search in more intuitive ways, text search remains the predominant tool for product discovery online. In this paper, we explore the effects of visual and textual cues for search refinement on consumer search and purchasing... View Details
Keywords: Consumer Behavior; E-commerce; Decision Choices and Conditions; Learning; Internet and the Web
Fang, Lu, Yanyou Chen, Chiara Farronato, Zhe Yuan, and Yitong Wang. "Platform Information Provision and Consumer Search: A Field Experiment." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 32099, February 2024.
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Exercise
Travelogo: Understanding Customer Journeys
By: Eva Ascarza, Nicolas Padilla and Oded Netzer
In late May 2023, Sarah Merino, the newly appointed manager of the Customer Insights group at Travelogo—an online travel booking platform—initiates a comprehensive analysis of clickstream data to understand the varied behaviors and needs of their users. In preparation... View Details
Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Analysis; Analytics and Data Science; Marketing Strategy; Segmentation; Consumer Behavior; Travel Industry; United States
Ascarza, Eva, Nicolas Padilla, and Oded Netzer. "Travelogo: Understanding Customer Journeys." Harvard Business School Exercise 524-044, January 2024. (Revised February 2024.)
- January–February 2024
- Article
Shared Service Delivery Can Increase Client Engagement: A Study of Shared Medical Appointments
By: Ryan W. Buell, Kamalini Ramdas, Nazlı Sönmez, Kavitha Srinivasan and Rengaraj Venkatesh
Problem Definition: Clients and service providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming – perhaps unquestioningly – that devoting individualized attention best improves client outcomes. In contrast, in shared service delivery, clients... View Details
Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Customer Satisfaction; Outcome or Result; Performance Improvement
Buell, Ryan W., Kamalini Ramdas, Nazlı Sönmez, Kavitha Srinivasan, and Rengaraj Venkatesh. "Shared Service Delivery Can Increase Client Engagement: A Study of Shared Medical Appointments." Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 26, no. 1 (January–February 2024): 154–166.
- 2023
- Working Paper
Debiasing Treatment Effect Estimation for Privacy-Protected Data: A Model Auditing and Calibration Approach
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Data-driven targeted interventions have become a powerful tool for organizations to optimize business outcomes
by utilizing individual-level data from experiments. A key element of this process is the estimation
of Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE), which... View Details
Huang, Ta-Wei, and Eva Ascarza. "Debiasing Treatment Effect Estimation for Privacy-Protected Data: A Model Auditing and Calibration Approach." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 24-034, December 2023.
- December 18, 2023
- Article
Are Everywhere Stores the New Face of Retail?
By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
Historically, customer engagement and product fulfillment occurred in the same place — a traditional retail store. But today, retailers are beginning to explore how they can create opportunities for customers to engage with products in native environments. A related... View Details
Keywords: Customer Focus and Relationships; Consumer Behavior; Distribution; Logistics; Retail Industry
Bell, David R., Santiago Gallino, and Antonio Moreno. "Are Everywhere Stores the New Face of Retail?" MIT Sloan Management Review (website) (December 18, 2023).
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Customer Journey as a Source of Information
By: Nicolas Padilla, Eva Ascarza and Oded Netzer
In the face of heightened data privacy concerns and diminishing third-party data access,
firms are placing increased emphasis on first-party data (1PD) for marketing decisions.
However, in environments with infrequent purchases, reliance on past purchases 1PD... View Details
Keywords: Customer Journey; Privacy; Consumer Behavior; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning; Customer Focus and Relationships
Padilla, Nicolas, Eva Ascarza, and Oded Netzer. "The Customer Journey as a Source of Information." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 24-035, October 2023. (Revised October 2023.)
- August 2023
- Background Note
Pricing and Customer Psychology
By: Elie Ofek
This note provides an overview of how psychological principles may be used as part of a seller’s pricing strategy. The note defines the concept of psychological pricing and explains the motivations for firms to engage in it. Prominent practices and tactics, with... View Details
Ofek, Elie. "Pricing and Customer Psychology." Harvard Business School Background Note 524-019, August 2023.
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Effects of Inconsistent Work Schedules on Employee Lateness and Absenteeism
By: Caleb Kwon and Ananth Raman
Problem Definition: Employee lateness and absenteeism pose challenges for businesses, particularly in the retail industry, where punctuality is vital for optimal store operations and customer service. This paper relates employee lateness and absenteeism with... View Details
Kwon, Caleb, and Ananth Raman. "The Effects of Inconsistent Work Schedules on Employee Lateness and Absenteeism." Working Paper, August 2023.
- 2023
- Working Paper
Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation
By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov
Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details
Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Research and Development; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior
Ham, Dae Woong, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley, and Iavor Bojinov. "Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 23-070, May 2023.
- May 3, 2023
- Article
What Top-Performing Sales Managers Do Differently
By: Mike Schultz and Frank V. Cespedes
Sales managers hire reps, influence their training, provide (we hope) feedback and so reinforce good selling behaviors, and are key in the execution of growth and change initiatives. In a study of more than 1,000 sales managers and sellers across industries, we found... View Details
Schultz, Mike, and Frank V. Cespedes. "What Top-Performing Sales Managers Do Differently." TrainingIndustry.com (May 3, 2023).