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- April 2021
- Case
Buy Online, Pickup in Store: Evaluating an Omnichannel Intervention in Retail
By: Antonio Moreno, Santiago Gallino and Amy Klopfenstein
In October 2018, fashion, wellness, and beauty retailer Sylvarella implemented a Buy Online, Pickup in Store (BOPS) program in an attempt to counteract a sales decline. While BOPS had the potential to meet customer expectations for a seamless order and fulfillment...
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- March 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
M-KOPA: Empowering Lives
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Wale Lawal and Pippa Tubman Armerding
The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011 had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative...
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- March 2021
- Article
Targeted Price Controls on Supermarket Products
By: Alberto Cavallo and Diego Aparicio
We study the impact of targeted price controls for supermarket products in Argentina from 2007 to 2015. Using web scraping, we collected daily prices for controlled and non-controlled goods and measured the differential effects on inflation, product availability, and...
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Keywords:
Prices;
Controls;
Price Dispersion;
Economics;
Price;
Cost Management;
Goods and Commodities;
Retail Industry;
Argentina
- March–April 2021
- Article
Selling After the Crisis
Like perishable goods in grocery stores, sales models have a sell-by date. As product standards evolve and new entrants emerge, buyers have more choices and demand more in terms of quality and performance across vendors. Firms that fail to adjust to changing customer...
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- February 2021
- Case
Threadless: The Renewal of an Online Community
By: Shane Greenstein, Karim Lakhani and Christian Godwin
Threadless, an online apparel company and artist community which Jake Nickell founded in 2000, continued to maintain its status as a top company in the online apparel industry during its second decade. From 2010 to 2020, Threadless continued to operate its...
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Keywords:
Business Model;
Decision Making;
Entrepreneurship;
Innovation and Invention;
Leading Change;
Management;
Marketing;
Product Launch;
Operations;
Supply Chain;
Distribution;
Networks;
Sales;
Strategy;
Adaptation;
Technology;
Software;
Technology Platform;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
Technology Industry;
North America
- February 15, 2021
- Article
How Real Sales Learning Happens: In the Flow of Work
By: Yuchun Lee, Mark Magnacca and Frank V. Cespedes
Most learning in sales is through peer learning in task-specific contexts, and the effects are cumulative because modeling behavior is a big driver of how salespeople develop. This is very different from the experience in most training seminars, especially if the...
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- 2021
- Book
Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing
Selling is changing, but the impact on sales of megatrends like ecommerce, big data, and AI is often misunderstood and not supported by empirical data. Managers who fail to separate fact from hype will make decisions based on bad assumptions and, in a competitive...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Crisis Interventions in Corporate Insolvency
By: Samuel Antill and Christopher Clayton
We model the optimal resolution of insolvent firms in general equilibrium. Absent externalities, the optimal corporate-insolvency system encourages lending by letting banks assign liquidations ex-post. We show that a social planner optimally intervenes in such a system...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Estimating Causal Effects in the Presence of Partial Interference Using Multivariate Bayesian Structural Time Series Models
By: Fiammetta Menchetti and Iavor Bojinov
Researchers regularly use synthetic control methods for estimating causal effects when a sub-set of units receive a single persistent treatment, and the rest are unaffected by the change. In many applications, however, units not assigned to treatment are nevertheless...
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- September 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
d.light
By: Michael Chu, Krishna G. Palepu and Dilyana Karadzhova Botha
Kenyan off-grid-solar pioneer d.light can power entire homes in rural Africa but must now decide how to fund the growth of its asset-heavy business model. Ned Tozun and Sam Goldman founded d.light in 2006 to transform lives through solar solutions enabling access to...
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- August 2020 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Migros Turkey: Scaling Online Operations (A)
By: Antonio Moreno and Gamze Yucaoglu
The case opens in November 2019 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey’s oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are contemplating what the best fulfillment format and...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Conflicting Interests and the Effect of Fiduciary Duty—Evidence from Variable Annuities
By: Mark Egan, Shan Ge and Johnny Tang
We examine the drivers of variable annuity sales and the impact of a proposed regulatory change. Variable annuities are popular retirement products with over $2 trillion in assets in the United States. Insurers typically pay brokers a commission for selling variable...
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- July 2020 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Pattern Brands
By: Sunil Gupta, Elie Ofek and Julia Kelley
In March 2020, direct-to-consumer (DTC) company Pattern Brands needed to decide how to allocate resources across its different brands. Pattern Co-Founders Nick Ling and Emmett Shine hoped to avoid the pitfalls faced by some DTC companies—such as inability to scale and...
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Keywords:
Direct-to-consumer;
Brands and Branding;
Marketing Channels;
Marketing Strategy;
Product Marketing;
Product Launch;
Product Positioning;
Business Model;
Business Startups;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Demand and Consumers;
Business Strategy;
Diversification;
Competitive Advantage;
Consumer Products Industry;
Retail Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
New York (city, NY);
New York (state, US)
- June 2020
- Case
TransDigm: The Acquisition of Aerosonic Corp.
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel W. Fisher
In April 2013, TransDigm, a company that manufactured a wide range of highly engineered aerospace parts for both military and commercial aircraft, announced an agreement to acquire Aerosonic Corporation for $39 million in cash (1.2 times Aerosonic’s sales of $31...
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- June 2020
- Teaching Note
Armarium: Luxury Fashion Brands for Rent
By: Jill Avery and David Fubini
Armarium, a two-sided digital platform that offered consumers the opportunity to rent the most coveted, current season high fashion clothing and accessories from the top global luxury brands, had emerged from its first sales season with two distinct customer segments:...
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Keywords:
Luxury Brand;
Fashion;
Sharing Economy;
Two-sided Marketplace;
Target Market;
Customer Selection;
Marketing;
Brands and Branding;
Luxury;
Two-Sided Platforms;
Business Model;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Customer Value and Value Chain;
Fashion Industry;
Consumer Products Industry;
United States;
North America
- June 2020
- Article
Frenemies in Platform Markets: Heterogeneous Profit Foci as Drivers of Compatibility Decisions
By: Ron Adner, Jianqing Chen and Feng Zhu
We study compatibility decisions of two competing platform owners that generate profits through both hardware sales and royalties from content sales. We consider a game-theoretic model in which two platforms offer different standalone utilities to users. We find that...
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- May 2020 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
TransDigm's Acquisition and Integration of Arkwin Industries
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel W. Fisher
In May 2013, TransDigm, a company that manufactured a wide range of highly engineered aerospace parts for both military and civilian aircraft, announced it was buying Arkwin Industries for $286 million in cash (3 times Arkwin’s sales of $91 million). Having acquired...
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- March 2020
- Case
Forbidden City: Launching a Craft Beer in China
By: Christopher A. Bartlett and Carole Carlson
This case describes a difficult choice faced by Victor Wang, Managing Director of Singapore-based Eurasian Brewing Company (EBC), concerning the competing product launch plans of Le Jie, Vice President of EBC's China and East Asian operations, and Vivian Chin, EBC's...
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- February 28, 2020
- Article
How Tesla Sets Itself Apart
By: Lou Shipley
Tesla and its flamboyant, and sometimes erratic, innovator Elon Musk have turned the more than a century old industry upside down in a mere 16 years. Traditional automakers are ill prepared to compete in today’s software-centered world. Unlike nimble Tesla, they are...
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- January 2020
- Case
Zara: An Integrated Store and Online Model (A)
By: Antonio Moreno
In 2010, amidst the growth of ecommerce and the emergence of new, purely online, fashion players, Zara launched its first online store, Zara.com. Since then, Zara’s online business had grown at a fast pace. By 2018, 12% of Inditex Group’s total sales came from the...
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Keywords:
E-commerce;
Stores;
Integration;
Operations;
Business Model;
Strategy;
Retail Industry;
Fashion Industry;
Europe