Marketing is critical for organic growth of a business and its central role is in creating, communicating, capturing and sustaining value for an organization. Marketing helps a firm in creating value by better understanding the needs of its customers and providing them with innovative products and services. This value is communicated through a variety of channels as well as through the firm's branding strategy. Effective management of customers and pricing allows the firm to capture part of the value it has created. Finally, by building an effective customer-centric organization a firm attempts to sustain value over time.

Our faculty addresses a broad array of topics in all of these areas. Our work attempts to get a better understanding of how consumers use information and make choices and how these choices affect the firm's strategy for new product development, customer relationship management, branding and other marketing efforts. We examine issues related to branding, business marketing, global marketing, distribution channels, pricing, direct and interactive marketing, sales management and return on marketing investment. Some of our faculty specializes in specific industries such as retailing, agribusiness, social enterprise, media, arts and entertainment.

There are several new developments in marketing that offer opportunities for us to make important contributions in the future. The current economic crisis is changing consumers' current and future purchase and consumption patterns. Search engines have changed the way consumers obtain information and make decisions and they are also dramatically changing the advertising industry. Social networks and user generated content have opened a new way for consumers to engage with each other as well as with brands and companies. There are significant changes in the attitudes of consumers and companies about social issues. Consumer preferences and choice of products are increasingly influenced by social factors. Companies are recognizing that there is a large market at the "bottom of the pyramid" and marketing to these consumers may require a new framework. These and related developments provide great opportunities for the marketing faculty to make a significant impact in the future.

In The News

Recent Publications

  • RECENT PUBLICATION: Working Paper

    Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

    The Value of Descriptive Analytics: Evidence from Online Retailers

    Ron Berman and

    Does the adoption of descriptive analytics impact online retailer performance, and if so, how? We use the synthetic control method to analyze the staggered adoption of a retail analytics dashboard by more than 1,000 e-commerce websites, and find an increase of 13–20% in average weekly revenues post-adoption. We demonstrate that only retailers that adopt and use the dashboard reap these benefits. The increase in revenue is not explained by price changes or advertising optimization. Instead, it is consistent with the addition of prospecting and personalization technologies to retailer websites. The adoption and usage of descriptive analytics also increases the diversity of products sold, the number of transactions, the numbers of website visitors and unique customers, and the revenue from repeated customers. In contrast, there is no change in basket size. Put together, these findings are consistent with an indirect effect of descriptive analytics, and they suggest that the adoption of analytics serves as a monitoring device that allows retailers to assess the value of new technologies. Without using the descriptive dashboard, retailers are unable to reap the benefits associated with these technologies.

    Citation:

    Berman, Ron, and Ayelet Israeli. "The Value of Descriptive Analytics: Evidence from Online Retailers." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-067, November 2020.  View Details
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  • RECENT PUBLICATION: Case

    Case | HBS Case Collection | November 2020

    Holaluz: Taking on the Spanish Energy Market

    , , 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?

    Keywords: Spain;

    Citation:

    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.  View Details
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  • RECENT PUBLICATION: Working Paper

    Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

    The Twofold Effect of Customer Retention in Freemium Settings

    , Oded Netzer and Julian Runge

    The main tradeoff in designing freemium services is how much of the product to offer for free. At the heart of such a tradeoff is the balancing act of providing a valuable free product in order to acquire and engage consumers, while making the free product limited enough to entice some consumers to pay for the service. We argue that customer retention plays an important role in balancing this tradeoff, due to customer retention’s twofold effect in freemium services—it not only generates additional revenues from the advertising side but can also increase user’s monetization in the future—firms are often myopic in their retention efforts by not recognizing that by limiting the free product, the firm is not only risking monetary losses from the advertising side but is also suffering monetary losses from the premium side. We leverage a large-scale field experiment run in a mobile game context, where game difficulty was exogenously manipulated among customers at risk of churning. As expected, giving customers an easier game significantly decreases purchases in the specific round played. However, lowering the game difficulty not only increases short-term play and subsequent retention, but also increases customer spending from premium services both in the short- and long-run. We find substantial heterogeneity in the effect of reducing game difficulty, where customers who are more prone to making progress in the games exhibit stronger effects and customers who previously spent money on the game exhibit the strongest effect on in-app purchases. We leverage these insights to recommend personalized freemium product design strategies and show how the focal firm can further increase revenues from both advertising and premium services.

    Keywords: freemium; retention; retention/churn; field experiment; Field Experiments; gaming; gaming industry; mobile app; mobile app industry; monetization; monetization strategy;

    Citation:

    Ascarza, Eva, Oded Netzer, and Julian Runge. "The Twofold Effect of Customer Retention in Freemium Settings." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-062, November 2020.  View Details
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Doctoral Students

Mengjie (Magie) Cheng

Ximena Garcia-Rada Benavides

Serena Hagerty

Ryan Hauser

Ta-Wei (David) Huang

Byungyeon Kim

Emily Prinsloo

Lucy Shen


 

Faculty Positions

Harvard Business School seeks candidates in all fields for full time positions. Candidates with outstanding records in PhD or DBA programs are encouraged to apply.

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Contact Information

Marketing Unit
Harvard Business School
Morgan Hall
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Marketing@hbs.edu

HBS Working Knowledge

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re R. Karim Lakhani, Boris Groysberg, Tsedal Neeley, C. Arthur Brooks, R. Kyle Myers, V. Frank Cespedes, M. Shane Greenstein, Rohit Deshpande, J. Jill Avery, Euvin Naidoo, Raffaella Sadun and A. John Quelch
Here are recent ideas for managing through the pandemic on the topics of people management, strategy, marketing, and organizational design.
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re I. Michael Norton
In the wake of COVID-19, firms announced both employee furloughs and (typically small) CEO wage cuts. This research shows that firms’ treatment of employees matters far more to consumers than executi
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re J. Jill Avery
Glossier, the digital-first, direct-to-consumer beauty brand considers shifting its strategy toward influencer marketing and paid media. Professor Jill Avery discusses her case study.

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Harvard Business Publishing

Article
by Anita Elberse and Sir Alex Ferguson
Case
by José B. Alvarez, Zeynep Ton and Annelena Lobb
Press Book
by Sunil Gupta

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