Faculty & Research

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.

Recent Publications

Michelin: Building a Digital Service Platform

By: Sunil Gupta
  • May 2021 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Related

BlackRock: Linking Purpose to Profit

By: Rohit Deshpandé, Aiyesha Dey and George Serafeim
  • May 2021 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Teaching Note of HBS Case No. 120-042
Keywords: Blackrock; Investment Management; Stewardship Codes; Stewardship Role Of Institutions; Esg; Purpose; Corporate Purpose; Investment; Asset Management; Corporate Governance; Financial Services Industry; United States
Related

Time Dependence and Preference: Implications for Compensation Structure and Shift Scheduling

By: Doug J. Chung, Byungyeon Kim and Byoung G. Park
  • 2021 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
This study jointly examines agents’ time dependence—period effects within instantaneous utility—and time preference—behavior on discounting future utility. The study considers the start- and end-of-period effects for time dependence and exponential and hyperbolic discounting for time preference. It provides identification arguments and sufficient conditions for both time constructs. The data include agents’ work-shift schedules and daily observations in response to a firm’s non-linear compensation structure, in which the final payment depends on the history of performance. By illustrating how various time constructs jointly affect behavior, the study provides implications for designing compensation structure and employee-shift scheduling. Specifically, it disentangles the effects of time constructs to examine the effectiveness of long versus short quota-evaluation cycles, quota-bonus versus commission incentive schemes, and employee-shift scheduling. In addition, the study provides a field validation that compares post-analysis actual and counterfactual outcomes to validate the prediction accuracy of the model.
Keywords: Time Preferences; Present Bias; Hyperbolic Discounting; Compensation; Dynamic Structural Models; Identification
Related

Hot Wheels: Launching the Mixed-Play Experience

By: Elie Ofek and Andres Terech
  • April 2021 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Hot Wheels at Mattel: Reinventing the Wheel

By: Elie Ofek, Andres Terech and Lisa Shaughnessy
  • April 2021 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Thingtesting: Launching a Brand Discovery and Testing Digital Community

By: Ayelet Israeli and Jill Avery
  • April 2021 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Teaching note for the "Thingtesting: Launching a Brand Discovery and Testing Digital Community" case (HBS 520-086)
Keywords: Influencer Marketing; Influencers; Influencer; Monetization; Monetization Strategy; Female; Female Entrepreneur; Female Protagonist; Direct-to-consumer; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Venture Capital; Entrepreneurship; Marketing Communications; Consumer Products Industry; Financial Services Industry; Advertising Industry; London; United Kingdom; Europe; North America
Related

Borusan CAT: Monetizing Prediction in the Age of AI (A)

By: Navid Mojir and Gamze Yucaoglu
  • April 2021 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Borusan Cat is an international distributor of Caterpillar heavy machines. Esra Durgun (Director of Strategy, Digitization, and Innovation) and Ozgur Gunaydin (CEO) seem to have bet their careers on developing Muneccim, a new predictive technology that is designed to reduce downtime of heavy construction machines that Borusan Cat sells. While they have been able to manage to develop the technology to a level that beats any human expert in predicting machine failures, they still have not been able to find a way to monetize the technology. After spending a few years and millions of dollars developing the technology, they are both under pressure from Borusan Group, Borusan Cat’s holding company, to show monetary results. Sales have been declining due to the economic downturn in Turkey, and the Company has been losing market share to their strong domestic competitors. Gunaydin and Durgun must decide about their monetization strategy for Muneccim and pick which segment of the market they want to target with this technology.
Keywords: Turkey
Related

Drinkworks: Home Bar by Keurig

By: Sunil Gupta and Jonathan Levav
  • April 2021 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 521-010. In the summer of 2018, Drinkworks CEO Nathaniel Davis needed to make a number of go-to-market decisions ahead of his company’s upcoming product launch. Formed through a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch InBev, Drinkworks had developed an innovative home bar system that let consumers make single-serving cocktails or beer with the push of a button. Keurig and AB InBev provided valuable technological, supply chain, and regulatory expertise, but since the Drinkworks Home Bar was a novel product, there were no established market benchmarks for the Drinkworks team to follow as they prepared for the Home Bar’s upcoming market launch. After conducting several market research experiments, they needed to interpret the results and make several decisions around customer segmentation, value proposition, product assortment, pricing, and distribution channels. Could Drinkworks be the next billion-dollar opportunity for Keurig and AB InBev?
Keywords: Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Markets; Bids and Bidding; Demand and Consumers; Consumer Behavior; Market Design; Distribution; Distribution Channels; Product; Product Design; Product Development; Business Model; Customers; Customer Value and Value Chain; Decision Making; Decisions; Goods and Commodities; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Business or Company Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Research; Research and Development; Strategy; Adoption; Competitive Advantage; Segmentation; Technology; Hardware; Value; Value Creation; Food and Beverage Industry; Consumer Products Industry; North and Central America; United States
Related
More Publications

In the News

More Faculty News

HBS Working Knowledge

More Working Knowledge Articles

Harvard Business Publishing

→More Harvard Business Publishing

Seminars & Conferences

→More Seminars & Conferences

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.
Learn More

Contact Information

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