Publications

Find at Harvard

15 Jul 2015
Research & Ideas

Amazon Prime Day: The Logic Behind a Retailer’s Made-up Holiday

Amazon.com is taking an interesting approach to its birthday this year. The company is throwing itself a party where all its Prime customers get the gifts. Amazon Prime Day is slated for July 15th, "a one-day shopping event with more... View Details

Keywords: Re: Sunil Gupta; Retail

May 2018
Case

Inditex: 2018

By: John R. Wells and Gabriel Ellsworth

In 2018, Inditex, based in Spain, was the largest specialist fashion retailer in the world, generating sales of $31.5 billion in 2017 from a portfolio of eight retail brands selling through a total of 7,475 stores located in 96 countries and from websites in 49... View Details

Keywords: Fashion; Succession; IPO; Competition; Initial Public Offering; Multinational Firms and Management; Management Succession; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Retail Industry; Fashion Industry

28 Nov 2018
HBS Case

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

data about its online customers—products purchased, browsing habits, items abandoned in shopping carts—yet it wasn’t fully leveraging all that information. The company began to see this huge pile of... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail

07 Dec 2015
HBS Seminar

Antonio Moreno-Garcia, Assistant Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Offline Showrooms in Omni-channel Retail: Demand and Operational Benefits

Omnichannel environments where customers shop online and offline at the same retailer are ubiquitous, and are deployed by online-first and traditional retailers alike. We focus on the relatively understudied domain of online-first retailers and the engagement of... View Details

June 2011 (Revised June 2012)
Case

Sephora Direct: Investing in Social Media, Video, and Mobile

By: Elie Ofek and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

Julie Bornstein, senior vice president of Sephora Direct, is seeking to double her budget for social media and other digital marketing initiatives for 2011. A number of digital efforts implemented in the past two years seem to be bearing fruit and there is a desire to... View Details

Keywords: History; Leadership; Marketing Strategy; Marketing; Emerging Markets; Investment Return; Investment Funds; Budgets and Budgeting

16 Jul 2007
Research & Ideas

Understanding the ‘Want’ vs. ’Should’ Decision

with Milkman and Rogers, they discuss their working paper "I'll Have the Ice Cream Soon and the Vegetables Later: Decreasing Impatience over Time in Online Grocery Orders," which looks at our tendency as consumers to choose... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Retail; Entertainment & Recreation

19 Nov 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

E-Santa: Is Retail Ready for Digital Christmas?

at risk of losing them. Retailing Revolution: Category Killers on the Brink Mass-market retailers, particularly big-box "category killers," are under critical pressure from online competitors. Why View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

April 2019 (Revised March 2020)
Case

Handy: The Future of Work? (A)

By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Kieron Stopforth

Witnessing numerous lawsuits alleging that online platform companies misclassified workers as contractors when they were actually employees, Handy’s founders faced a series of decisions. Handy was an online platform business that enabled customers to book appointments... View Details

Keywords: Employment; Working Conditions; Entrepreneurship; Compensation and Benefits; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Fairness; Service Industry; United States

Article

Offline Showrooms in Omni-channel Retail: Demand and Operational Benefits

By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno

Omnichannel environments where customers shop online and offline at the same retailer are ubiquitous and are deployed by online-first and traditional retailers alike. We focus on the relatively understudied domain of online-first retailers and the engagement of a key... View Details

Keywords: Experience Attributes; Marketing–operations Interface; Omnichannel Retailing; Quasi-experimental Methods; Retail Operations; Showrooms; Marketing Channels; Demand and Consumers; Performance Efficiency; Retail Industry

Find at Harvard

26 Feb 2014
Research & Ideas

How Grocery Bags Manipulate Your Mind

out that an everyday item has the power to act as both angel and devil every time we go to the grocery store. It lurks in car trunks and pantries all over the world, waiting to guide us simultaneously down paths of virtue and vice. What is this surprising Svengali?... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail

10 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

Why a Federal Rule on CEO Pay Disclosure May Get You In Trouble With Customers

Norton and Rohit Deshpandé. Mohan's interest in the subject began when she was a kid, on a shopping trip with her father. "We were walking around Costco, and he turned to me and said, 'You know, what I love about this company is that the... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail

Research Summary

Drip Pricing

Anyone who has shopped for an airline ticket online has experienced drip pricing, as each successive screen seems to reveal another fee throughout the purchasing process. This practice is becoming prevalent in a variety of industries, but its effect on consumers is... View Details

May 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Market by Met Council: Revolutionizing Food Pantries in the Digital Age

By: Elisabeth Paulson and Michael W. Toffel

In fall 2023, the Food Program of Met Council—America’s largest Jewish charity dedicated to fighting poverty—completed the rollout of the newest version of its digital pantry platform to twelve food pantries in the Met Council food pantry network. The digital... View Details

Keywords: Customer Focus and Relationships; Digital Transformation; Nonprofit Organizations; Service Operations; Human Needs