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Marketing

  • Overview
  • Faculty
  • Curriculum
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    Article

    How to Really Motivate Salespeople

    Doug J. Chung

    Field research supports some current compensation practices but calls others into question

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    Book

    Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology

    Norton, Michael I., Derek D. Rucker & Cait Lamberton, eds.

    The handbook provides a comprehensive overview of consumer psychology, examining cutting-edge research at the individual, interpersonal, and societal levels.

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    Award

    The New York Times Paywall Case

    Vineet Kumar, Bharat Anand, Sunil Gupta & Felix Oberholzer-Gee

    Received The Case Centre's Management Category Award in Marketing

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    Article

    Minimum Advertised Pricing: Patterns of Violation in Competitive Retail Markets

    Ayelet Israeli, Eric Anderson, and Anne Coughlan

    We study the extent and depth of MAP violations among online retailers and confront managerial wisdom with empirical data.

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    HBS Case

    Apple Pay

    Gupta, Sunil, Shelle M. Santana, & Margaret L. Rodriguez

    What should Apple do to continue the early momentum for the adoption and use of Apple Pay?

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    Working Paper

    Why Outlet Stores Exist: Averting Cannibalization in Product Line Extensions

    Donald K. Ngwe

    Outlet stores enable firms to expand their markets while increasing new product introductions for their core consumers.

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    Award

    Outstanding Case Teacher

    Anita Elberse

    This world-wide Case Centre competition recognizes an excellent practitioner in the case classroom.

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Page Content

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

  • Want Digital Disruption? Decouple the Customer Experience

    Re: Thales Teixeira

    Inc., 13 FEB 2019

  • Why didn’t the Panera Cares social experiment pay off?

    Re: Shelle Santana

    Boston Globe, 08 FEB 2019

  • You can’t be productive without routines and rituals. Here’s why

    Re: Francesca Gino and Michael Norton

    Fast Company, 20 JAN 2019

Recent Publications

  • RECENT PUBLICATION: Working Paper

    Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

    The Value of First Impressions: Leveraging Acquisition Data for Customer Management

    Nicolas Padilla and Eva Ascarza

    Managing customers effectively is crucial for firms long-term profitability. By understanding differences across customers, firms can tailor their activities towards those customers for whom the intervention will pay off, therefore increasing the value of customers while maximizing the return on the marketing efforts. Targeting effectively ultimately depends in the firms ability to precisely estimate differences across customers‒a very difficult task when firms attempt to manage recently-acquired customers for whom only the first purchase has been observed. We propose a model that allows marketers to form “first impressions" of customers right after having been acquired. We define a first impression as an inference (based on the observed behaviors at the moment of acquisition) that the firm makes about customers traits that are relevant for the firm (e.g., whether the customer will purchase again, how s/he will respond to specific marketing actions). The main aspect of the model is that it captures latent dimensions that impact both the variety of behaviors collected at acquisition as well as future propensities to buy and to respond to marketing actions. Using probabilistic machine learning, we combine deep exponential families with the demand model, relating behaviors observed in the first purchase with consequent customer behavior. We first demonstrate that such a model is flexible enough to capture a wide range of heterogeneity structures (both linear and non-linear), thus being applicable to a variety of behaviors and contexts. We also demonstrate the model's ability to handle large amounts of data while overcoming commonly faced challenges such as data redundancy, missing data, and the presence of irrelevant information. We then apply the model to data from a retail context and illustrate how the focal firm could form customers' first impressions by merely using its transactional database. We show that the focal firm would significantly improve the return on their marketing actions if it targeted just-acquired customers based on their first impressions.

    Keywords: Customer Management, Targeting, Deep Exponential Families, Probabilistic Machine Learning; Retail Industry;

    Citation:

    Padilla, Nicolas, and Eva Ascarza. "The Value of First Impressions: Leveraging Acquisition Data for Customer Management." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-091, February 2019.  View Details
    CiteView DetailsSSRN Read Now Related
  • RECENT PUBLICATION: Working Paper

    Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

    Calculators for Women: When Identity Appeals Provoke Backlash

    Tami Kim, Kate Barasz, Leslie John and Michael I. Norton

    From “Chick Beer” to “Dryer sheets for Men,” identity-based labeling is frequently deployed to appeal to people who hold the targeted identity. However, five studies demonstrate that identity appeals can backfire, alienating the very individuals they aim to attract. We begin by demonstrating backlash against identity appeals in the field during the 2016 presidential election (Study 1) and in the lab (Study 2). This (in)effectiveness of identity appeals is driven by categorization threat—feeling unwillingly reduced to a single identity—which is induced when a) the identity deployed is that of a typically marginalized group (Studies 3-4) and b) the appeal evokes a stereotype about that identity (Study 5). Ironically, identity appeals often drive identity-holders away from options they would have preferred in the absence of that appeal.

    Keywords: identity;

    Citation:

    Kim, Tami, Kate Barasz, Leslie John, and Michael I. Norton. "Calculators for Women: When Identity Appeals Provoke Backlash." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-086, February 2019.  View Details
    CiteView DetailsSSRN Read Now Related
  • RECENT PUBLICATION: Case

    Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2019

    Philips' Connected Baby Bottle

    Rajiv Lal, Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

    Keywords: smart connected products;

    Citation:

    Lal, Rajiv, Srikant M. Datar, and Caitlin N. Bowler. "Philips' Connected Baby Bottle." Harvard Business School Case 519-020, January 2019.  View Details
    CiteView DetailsEducatorsRelated

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Page Content 2

Doctoral Students

Ximena Garcia-Rada Benavides

Michael Els

Dafna Goor

Serena Hagerty

Byungyeon Kim

Emily Prinsloo

Lucy Shen

Anne Wilson

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.

View Open Positions »

Contact Information

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

HBS Working Knowledge

Pic
What’s Really Disrupting Business? It’s Not Technology
re Thales S. Teixeira
Technology doesn't drive disruption—customers do. In a new book, marketing professor Thales Teixeira argues that successful disruptors are faster to spot and serve emerging customer needs than larger
Pic
Could Big Data Replace the Creative Director at the Gap?
re Ayelet Israeli
Is it time to throw out the creative director and rely on big data to predict what consumers want to wear next? Assistant Professor Ayelet Israeli discusses how Gap CEO Art Peck considers a bold idea
PicPic
Opportunistic Returns and Dynamic Pricing: Empirical Evidence from Online Retailing in Emerging Markets
re Antonio Moreno and Donald K. Ngwe
Dynamic pricing is widely applied in industries like airline ticketing, ride-sharing, and online retailing. This paper identifies two downsides of dynamic pricing: opportunistic returns and strategic

More »

Harvard Business Publishing

Article
Ferguson's Formula
by Anita Elberse and Sir Alex Ferguson
Case
Kodak: The Rebirth of an Iconic Brand
by Anat Keinan, Giana M. Eckhardt and Michael B. Beverland
Press Book
Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business
by Sunil Gupta

More »

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