Faculty & Research

Marketing

Marketing

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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.

Recent Publications

When It's Time to Expand Beyond the Base

By: Marco Bertini and Nader Tavassoli
  • September–October 2017 |
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Related

Drinkworks Teaching Note Excel Supplement

By: Sunil Gupta
  • July 2021 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Transformative Social Impact: KaBOOM!

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Sarah Appleby
  • July 2021 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Allianz Customer Centricity: Is Simplicity the Way Forward?

By: Eva Ascarza and Emilie Billaud
  • July 2021 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
This case explores the tradeoffs between product personalization and simplicity as companies grow. The case presents an opportunity to understand whether and how each of these approaches enables and/or limits companies’ abilities to provide customer satisfaction while being efficient in their operations. In October 2018, Allianz was one of the world’s leading insurers and asset managers with 103 million retail and corporate customers in 70 countries. It was one of only two insurers to rank amongst the world’s 50 strongest brands in 2017, a sign that the company’s customer-centricity approach drove value and resonated with clients. Allianz’s ambition was to reach the top 25 brands in Interbrand’s ranking by 2025. For the insurer, the key to success was to focus on simplicity—reducing the complexity of products and processes in order to create a more unified customer experience. However, such a move did not align with current trends in insurance markets, where Allianz’s main competitors had opted for hyper-personalization. Furthermore, a strategy focused on simplicity implied a radical move in certain key markets where Allianz had traditionally offered a large diversity of products. Was simplicity the right strategy? Would Allianz be able to embrace customer needs successfully within and across markets while simultaneously growing its business?
Keywords: Insurance Industry; Europe; Germany
Related

Availability and Nutrient Composition of Vegetarian Items at U.S. Fast-Food Restaurants

By: Caroline G. Dunn, Mark J. Soto, Sophia V. Hua, Elizabeth A. Keenan, Lindsay M. Jaacks, Julia A. Wolfson and Sara N. Bleich
  • July 2021 |
  • Article |
  • Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
Research Questions: What are patterns in availability of vegetarian items in U.S. fast-food chains (2012 to 2018) and are there differences in nutrient composition between and within vegetarian and nonvegetarian items annually and over time? Key Findings: In this longitudinal analysis of secondary data, the annual proportion of vegetarian items remained consistent (approximately 20%, annually). Overall, vegetarian items had significantly fewer calories, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, protein, and sodium annually than nonvegetarian items, but increases in per-item sodium (+2.0 mg per year before calorie adjustment) and unsaturated fat (+0.2 g per year before calorie adjustment) among vegetarian items suggest surveillance remains important as vegetarian options increase in popularity.
Keywords: Fast Food; Restaurants; Vegetarian; Consumer Health; Sodium; Food; Nutrition; Health; Food and Beverage Industry; United States
Related

Risk Sensitivity or Social Signaling? Unmasking Behaviors with Video Analytics

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kaiquan Xu and Kannan Srinivasan
  • 2021 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Why did people comply, or not, while shopping in 2020? Do these motivations relate to their shopping behaviors? Based on the recent literature on mask-wearing, we define three customer groups: Self-Protectors wear a mask primarily because they are sensitive to their own health risk, while Social-Signalers wear a mask primarily to signal social responsibility; meanwhile, Insensitive-Shoppers do not wear a mask. We collected four months of shopping videos in 2020 in a department store where mask-wearing was not mandated, and we determined each customer’s group from their mask-wearing choice and shopping duration. We found significant differences in the purchased items—e.g., Self-Protectors bought more healthy products and explored less variety, while Social-Signalers bought fewer popular products and more hedonic products. We trained a multi-class tree-classification model on the sales data and achieved a high prediction accuracy of 84% on a hold-out sample. This research has managerial implications for customer segmentation and targeting as well as social implications for messaging to encourage public mask-wearing.
Keywords: Social Perception
Related

How Are We Going to Pay for This? Taboo Tradeoffs and Why Business Leaders Need to Ask Better Questions

By: Jean-Manuel Izaret, Marco Bertini, John Pineda and Amadeus Petzke
  • 2021 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Related

The Situational Samaritan: How and Why Marketplace Conditions Shape Prosocial Consumer Behaviors

By: Julia von Schuckmann, Lucia S.G. Barrios, Grant E. Donnelly and Marco Bertini
  • 2021 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Related
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Contact Information

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