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- August 2024
- Case
Oculii
By: Andy Wu and Lucas Defilippo
It was a bright June day in 2016. Steven Hong, co-founder and COO of Oculii had just signed a letter of intent agreeing to a 51% stake acquisition by Nexteer Automotive, a global steering and driveline supplier company that developed advanced driver assistance systems... View Details
- July 2024
- Case
Dynamic Pricing at Wendy’s: Where’s the Beef?
By: Elie Ofek, Alicia Dadlani and Martha Hostetter
In early 2024, Wendy’s new CEO announced on an earnings call that the company would install digital menus in its US locations so it could begin testing dynamic pricing—changing prices up or down in response to shifts in supply and demand – as well as allow engaging in... View Details
- May 2024
- Background Note
Pricing Strategy and Channels of Distribution: Where Value Delivery and Value Capture Intersect
By: Elie Ofek
Channels of distribution are a critical component of a firm’s go-to-market strategy. A company may elect to sell its products directly to customers (DTC) without the assistance of any intermediaries or, alternatively, it may seek several channel partners to help it... View Details
- March 2024 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Amperity: First-Party Data at a Crossroads
By: Elie Ofek, Hema Yoganarasimhan and Alexis Lefort
In the summer of 2023, Amperity management was facing a critical decision on its future direction. Given the dramatic changes occurring within the digital advertising ecosystem, as concerns over consumer privacy placed limits on the ability to engage in third-party... View Details
- March 2024
- Article
Being Together in Place as a Catalyst for Scientific Advance
By: Eamon Duede, Misha Teplitskiy, Karim R. Lakhani and James Evans
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and scholarly advance. Using customized... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Course Overview Note
Managing Customers for Growth: Course Overview for Students
By: Eva Ascarza
Managing Customers for Growth (MCG) is a 14-session elective course for second-year MBA students at Harvard Business School. It is designed for business professionals engaged in roles centered on customer-driven growth activities. The course explores the dynamics of... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Exercise
Travelogo: Understanding Customer Journeys
By: Eva Ascarza, Nicolas Padilla and Oded Netzer
In late May 2023, Sarah Merino, the newly appointed manager of the Customer Insights group at Travelogo—an online travel booking platform—initiates a comprehensive analysis of clickstream data to understand the varied behaviors and needs of their users. In preparation... View Details
- January–February 2024
- Article
Shared Service Delivery Can Increase Client Engagement: A Study of Shared Medical Appointments
By: Ryan W. Buell, Kamalini Ramdas, Nazlı Sönmez, Kavitha Srinivasan and Rengaraj Venkatesh
Problem Definition: Clients and service providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming – perhaps unquestioningly – that devoting individualized attention best improves client outcomes. In contrast, in shared service delivery, clients... View Details
- December 18, 2023
- Article
Are Everywhere Stores the New Face of Retail?
By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
Historically, customer engagement and product fulfillment occurred in the same place — a traditional retail store. But today, retailers are beginning to explore how they can create opportunities for customers to engage with products in native environments. A related... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
ReUp Education: Can AI Help Learners Return to College?
By: Kris Ferreira, Christopher Thomas Ryan and Sarah Mehta
Founded in 2015, ReUp Education helps “stopped out students”—learners who have stopped making progress towards graduation—achieve their college completion goals. The company relies on a team of success coaches to engage with learners and help them reenroll. In 2019,... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
McDonald's Board of Directors (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
In October 2019, the McDonald’s Corporation board of directors, chaired by Enrique Hernandez, Jr., gathered to learn the results of their outside counsel’s investigation into the conduct of the CEO. On the surface, the iconic fast-food chain was thriving as growing... View Details
Keywords: Board Of Directors; Board Chair; Board Decisions; Business Ethics; Corporate Boards; Fast Food; Franchising; Legal Aspects Of Business; Legal Battle; Legal Settlement; Misconduct; Regulation; Reorganization; Restaurant Industry; Sexual Harassment; Shareholders; Stakeholder Management; Strategy And Execution; Turnaround; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Governance; Culture; Executive Compensation; Leadership; Management; Ethics; Governing and Advisory Boards; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Food and Beverage Industry; Illinois; United States
- 2023
- Working Paper
Targeting, Personalization, and Engagement in an Agricultural Advisory Service
By: Susan Athey, Shawn Cole, Shanjukta Nath and Jessica Zhu
ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We
examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully
increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We define, estimate, and... View Details
- August 2023
- Background Note
Pricing and Customer Psychology
By: Elie Ofek
This note provides an overview of how psychological principles may be used as part of a seller’s pricing strategy. The note defines the concept of psychological pricing and explains the motivations for firms to engage in it. Prominent practices and tactics, with... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
Gaining Organizational Adoption: Strategically Pacing the Deployment of Digital Innovations
By: Rebecca Karp
Scholars have long suggested that to foster adoption for their innovative products and services, entrepreneurs should engage with customers to better understand their unmet needs. Yet, customers frequently reside in organizations, and organizational members may not be... View Details
- May 2023
- Technical Note
Dynamic Pricing: Timing is Everything
By: Elie Ofek
This note provides a comprehensive exposition to the topic of dynamic pricing (whereby the fee customers are charged is time-dependent). It covers the motivation for firms to engage in dynamic pricing, provides a typology of the main formats dynamic pricing can take,... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings
By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin and Alexander MacKay
We study whether Amazon engages in self-preferencing on its marketplace by favoring its own brands (e.g., Amazon Basics) in search. To address this question, we collect new micro-level consumer search data using a custom browser extension installed by a panel of study... View Details
- April 2023
- Case
Twitter: The Freedom to Speak Freely and Be Heard
By: Randolph B. Cohen, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Mel Martin
In April 2022, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that he would be interested in purchasing the social media site Twitter for $44 billion. With more than 100 million twitter followers, Musk had historically leveraged the site to engage with the customers of his... View Details
- January 2023
- Teaching Note
Duolingo: Teaching Languages to the Masses
By: Youngme Moon
Teaching Note for HBS Case 323-016. At the time the case is written, Duolingo is the most popular language learning service in the world. The company has more than 40 million monthly active users, and the company’s total annual revenue has reached $250 million a year.... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
External Interfaces and Internal Processes: Market Positioning and Divergent Professionalization Paths in Young Ventures
By: Alicia DeSantola, Ranjay Gulati and Pavel Zhelyazkov
We explore how the initial market positioning of entrepreneurial ventures shapes how they professionalize over time, focusing specifically on the development of functional roles. In contrast to existing literature, which has presumed a uniform march toward... View Details
- November 2022 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Replika AI: Monetizing a Chatbot
By: Julian De Freitas and Nicole Tempest Keller
In early 2018, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based chatbot Replika AI, was deciding how to monetize the app she had built. Launched in 2017, Replika was a consumer AI “companion app” developed by a team of AI software engineers originally based in... View Details