Marketing

Marketing

Overview Faculty Curriculum Seminars & Conferences Awards & Honors Doctoral Students

About the Unit

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.

Honoring Professor Emeritus Al Silk, HBS and Family Virtual Gathering (December 10, 2021)

Recent Publications

Should Your Company Sell on Amazon?: Reach Comes at a Price

By: Ayelet Israeli, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Matt Higgins and Sabir Semerkant
  • September–October 2022 |
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Selling on Amazon allows brands to reach millions of consumers—but that exposure comes with costs. They include smaller margins, more competition, the risk of commoditization, and less knowledge about customers. In this article, the authors present a scorecard to help brands determine whether the benefits exceed those costs. Companies can evaluate themselves on such topics as ease of shipping their products, degree of customization needed, distribution issues, and counterfeiting concerns. Companies that choose to sell on the platform will need to make smart decisions about assortment offerings, page design, and fulfillment options so that they can take advantage of Amazon’s scale while protecting the long-term value of their brands.
Keywords: Retail; Retailing; Online Business; Ecommerce; E-commerce; E-Commerce Strategy; Omnichannel Retail; Omnichannel Retailing; Amazon; Amazon.com; Sales; Digital Marketing; Internet and the Web; Business Model; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Fashion Industry; Advertising Industry; Battery Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Distribution Industry; Electronics Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States
Related

The Pokémon Company: Evolving into an Everlasting Brand

By: Tomomichi Amano and Masaki Nomura
  • September 2022 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Yummy: Delivering Value to Venezuela

By: Ayelet Israeli, Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago and Carla Larangeira
  • September 2022 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 522-034.
Keywords: Internet and the Web; Health Pandemics; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Expansion
Related

What Would It Mean for a Machine to Have a Self?

By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp, Zeliha Uğuralp, Laurie Paul, Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Tomer Ullman
  • 2022 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
What would it mean for autonomous AI agents to have a ‘self’? One proposal for a minimal notion of self is a representation of one’s body spatio-temporally located in the world, with a tag of that representation as the agent taking actions in the world. This turns self-representation into a constructive inference process of self-orienting, and raises a challenging computational problem that any agent must solve continually. Here we construct a series of novel ‘self-finding’ tasks modeled on simple video games—in which players must identify themselves when there are multiple self-candidates—and show through quantitative behavioral testing that humans are near optimal at self-orienting. In contrast, well-known Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms, which excel at learning much more complex video games, are far from optimal. We suggest that self-orienting allows humans to navigate new settings, and that this is a crucial target for engineers wishing to develop flexible agents.
Keywords: Self; AI; Games; Reinforcement Learning; Avatar; AI and Machine Learning
Related

Marketing Through the Machine’s Eyes: Image Analytics and Interpretability

By: Flora Feng, Shunyuan Zhang and Kannan Srinivasan
  • 2022 |
  • Chapter |
  • Faculty Research
he growth of social media and the sharing economy is generating abundant unstructured image and video data. Computer vision techniques can derive rich insights from unstructured data and can inform recommendations for increasing profits and consumer utility—if only the model outputs are interpretable enough to earn the trust of consumers and buy-in from companies. To build a foundation for understanding the importance of model interpretation in image analytics, the first section of this article reviews the existing work along three dimensions: the data type (image data vs. video data), model structure (feature-level vs. pixel-level), and primary application (to increase company profits vs. to maximize consumer utility). The second section discusses how the “black box” of pixel-level models leads to legal and ethical problems, but interpretability can be improved with eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods. We classify and review XAI methods based on transparency, the scope of interpretability (global vs. local), and model specificity (model-specific vs. model-agnostic); in marketing research, transparent, local, model-agnostic methods are most common. The third section proposes three promising future research directions related to model interpretability: the economic value of augmented reality in 3D product tracking and visualization, field experiments to compare human judgments with the outputs of machine vision systems, and XAI methods to test strategies for mitigating algorithmic bias.
Keywords: Transparency; Marketing Research; Algorithmic Bias; AI and Machine Learning; Marketing
Related

PittaRosso: Artificial Intelligence-Driven Pricing and Promotion

By: Ayelet Israeli
  • September 2022 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 522-046.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Pricing; Pricing Algorithm; Pricing Decisions; Pricing Strategy; Pricing Structure; Promotion; Promotions; Online Marketing; Data-driven Decision-making; Data-driven Management; Retail; Retail Analytics; Price; Advertising Campaigns; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Digital Marketing; Budgets and Budgeting; Marketing Strategy; Marketing; Transformation; Decision Making; AI and Machine Learning; Retail Industry; Italy
Related

Icario Health: AI to Drive Health Engagement

By: David C. Edelman
  • August 2022 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Icario Health has built a market-leading AI engine to help health insurers drive better health behaviors for their members, enabling the insurers to improve their Medicare.
Keywords: Marketing; Health Care and Treatment; AI and Machine Learning; Health Industry; United States
Related

Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship

By: Rohit Deshpandé
  • August 2022 |
  • Course Overview Note |
  • Faculty Research
Keywords: Cultural Entrepreneurship; Arts; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Fine Arts Industry
Related
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Contact Information

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