Publications
Publications
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(3,596)
- Faculty Publications (997)
- January 2013 (Revised April 2015)
- Case
Affinity Labs: Valuing Customer Growth
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Elizabeth Kind
In November 2006, Chris Michel left Military.com, which he founded in 1999, to start Affinity Labs, a global network of online communities. That month, Michel raised a Series A round of venture funding and established a partnership with Monster, which he had sold... View Details
- January 2013
- Supplement
EverTrue: Mobile Technology Development (B)
By: William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell
Brent Grinna has one customer signed up for his alumni-networking mobile app, and is now trying to choose among three possibilities for a CTO. He decided to contract with a friend's company, Dashfire, to create a prototype of the app, and has signed up Brown University... View Details
- January 2013
- Case
Zappos.com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture (MM)
By: Frances X. Frei and Robin J. Ely
On July 17, 2009, Zappos.com, a privately-held online retailer of shoes, clothing, and other soft-line retail categories, learned that Amazon.com, a $19 billion multinational online retailer, had won its Board of Directors' approval to offer to merge the two companies.... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
Gender Bender Brand Hijacks and Consumer Revolt: The Porsche Cayenne Story
By: Jill Avery
Throughout history, marketers have created gendered brands, creating their brands and the stories they crafted about them in their advertising to appeal either to men or to women. Gendered brands deliver value to consumers, and therefore, deliver value to marketers.... View Details
- Winter 2013
- Article
How to Identify the Best Customers for Your Business
By: Frank V. Cespedes, James P. Dougherty and Ben S. Skinner III
How can businesses achieve profitable growth so that their costs don’t grow faster than sales? This article focuses on scaling a venture’s sales process and provides a methodology for identifying core customers and some implications for governance criteria and... View Details
- Article
Spanning the Institutional Abyss: The Intergovernmental Network and the Governance of Foreign Direct Investment
By: Juan Alcacer and Paul Ingram
Global economic transactions such as foreign direct investment must extend over an institutional abyss between the jurisdiction, and therefore protection, of the states involved. Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), whose members are states, represent an important... View Details
- January–February 2013
- Article
When the Crowd Fights Corruption
By: Paul M. Healy and Karthik Ramanna
Corruption is the greatest impediment to conducting business in Russia, according to leaders recently surveyed by the World Economic Forum. Indeed, it's a problem in many emerging markets, and businesses have a role to play in combating it, according to Healy and... View Details
- December 2012 (Revised April 2013)
- Case
Olam: On a New Course
By: David E. Bell, Forest Reinhardt and Mary Shelman
From modest beginnings as a cashew trader in Nigeria, Olam, founded by Indian nationals in 1989, has grown into a leading global agricultural trading company, with annual revenues of $14 billion. The company recently has begun investing in farms and in the production... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
Defending the Markers of Masculinity: Consumer Resistance to Brand Gender-Bending
By: Jill Avery
I study the Porsche Cayenne SUV launch to ethnographically analyze how men consuming a gendered brand respond to perceived brand gender contamination. Consumers' communal gender work in a Porsche brand community is analyzed to uncover brand gender contamination's... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Organization Design for Business Ecosystems
The modern corporation has long been the central focus of the field of organization design. Such firms can be likened to nation-states: they have boundaries that circumscribe citizen-employees, and they engage in production and trade. But individual corporations are... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
Reflected Knowledge and Trust in Global Collaboration
By: Mark Mortensen and Tsedal Neeley
Scholars argue that direct knowledge about distant colleagues is crucial for fostering trust in global collaboration. However, their arguments focus mainly on how trust accrues from knowledge about distant collaborators' personal characteristics, relationships, and... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
The Microwork Solution: A New Approach to Outsourcing Can Support Economic Development—and Add to Your Bottom Line
By: Francesca Gino and Bradely R. Staats
What's the best way to lift people out of poverty? The social entrepreneurs in the new "impact sourcing" industry believe the answer is providing work, not aid. Their organizations hire people at the bottom of the pyramid to perform digital tasks such as transcribing... View Details
- November 2012 (Revised August 2014)
- Case
Cisco in 2012: Reorganizing for Efficiency and Flexibility
By: Ranjay Gulati, Alison Berkley Wagonfeld and Luciana Silvestri
In 2012, Cisco was under intense pressure to show results: growth in its core business was decelerating and a number of exploratory ventures and acquisitions had not proven as profitable as expected. CEO John Chambers vowed to restore the company's health in a way that... View Details
- October 2012
- Article
Target the Right Market
By: Jill Avery and Thomas Steenburgh
SparkPlace is a two-year-old business with a hot new product: software that manages and measures the effectiveness of permission-based marketing campaigns for social media. The company is in the process of deciding on which of two customer segments to focus its... View Details
Keywords: Marketing; Market Segmentation; Customer Defection; Customer Lifetime Value; Customer Relationship Management; CRM; Market Segmentation And Target Market Selection; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Technology Industry; United States
- September 2012 (Revised December 2012)
- Case
Addleshaw Goddard LLP (Abridged)
By: Robert G. Eccles, Amy C. Edmondson and James Weber
Addleshaw-Goddard (AG), the 15th largest law firm in the UK, is seeking ways to serve larger clients on more important legal matters. Part of this strategy involves its "Client Development Centre (CDC)," an innovative idea and set of services launched by Dr. Jim Hever... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity
By: Jooa Julia Lee, Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats
People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Most people believe that bad weather conditions reduce productivity. In this research, we predict and find just... View Details
- July 2012 (Revised January 2014)
- Case
HGRM: Bringing Back High Touch Hospitality
By: Lynda M. Applegate and Gabriele Piccoli
The case centers on the dilemma faced by Carlo Fontana, the owner-operator of a small chain of two four-star urban hotels located in Lugano, Switzerland, and the other in Milan, Italy. Having developed an extensive customer service and operations information system,... View Details
- July 2012
- Article
iPhones for Friends, Refrigerators for Family: How Products Prime Social Networks
By: Lalin Anik and Michael I. Norton
We show that priming consumers with products associated with specific social networks increases the salience of those networks, influencing both word-of-mouth intentions and consumption. Consumers were exposed to friend- or family-related products (e.g., game consoles... View Details
- June 2012
- Case
PV Technologies, Inc.: Were They Asleep at the Switch?
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Diane Badame
PV Technologies, Inc. is an industry-leading manufacturer of photovoltaic inverters used to convert the direct current output of solar panels into alternating current for the commercial power grid. In conjunction with a request for proposal, the company's largest... View Details
- June 2012
- Case
Aman Resorts (Abridged)
By: Eugene Soltes and Aldo Sesia
This case describes the operating model and philosophy of this high-end set of global properties. Aman relies on employees taking considerable initiative to deliver the highest quality personalized service in the hospitality industry. The case also highlights Aman's... View Details