John A. Deighton

John A. Deighton

Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus

Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus

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John A. Deighton
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(617) 495-6545
Featured Work Publications Research Summary Teaching Awards & Honors
Overview
Professor Deighton conducts research at the intersection of information technology and marketing. He is interested in the complementary uses of human and artificial intelligence and creativity in areas such as advertising, content creation, and online retailing. He studies, on one hand, how data, particularly data that profiles individuals and depicts their social relationships, is gathered, processed, and applied by firms to acquire and retain customers. On the other hand, he studies how people manage their privacy and its obverse, their identities.
Keywords: Marketing; Media; Information Technology; Advertising Industry; Communications Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Information Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Publishing Industry; North and Central America; Asia; Europe
Personal Data in Marketing
Between 10% and 20% of all marketing activity in the United States, and a smaller proportion internationally, relies on data about individuals, whether personally identifying or pseudonomized. These data flow across a system of established and emerging firms operating as an industriy whose raw material is information about people and whose output is efficient matching of sellers to buyers.  This research project is concerned with questions of public policy and corporate strategy. The research investigates the industry's value chain, its sub-structures, its pattern of evolution, and its future.  It considers regulation and legislation, and will examine the comparative effects of regulatory regimes.
Keywords: Data; Personal Data; Information Technology; Industry Structure; Marketing
Anonymity and Identity
In most consumer markets, consumers are accustomed to operating in relative anonymity. A complex social adjustment is occurring as people realize that anonymity is often no longer their default condition - it must be sought and in some cases bought. New conceptions of privacy are being constructed by processes of public policymaking and marketplace negotiation in settings that range from healthcare to security in air travel to email spam. This research is building a conceptual framework and empirical evidence on consumer preferences for anonymity and identity.
Keywords: Privacy; Anonymity
Social Media and Their Consequences
Social media have had negative consequences for entertainment industries such as music and motion pictures, but they have had positive implications too. This project is concerned with one aspect of these social media effects: changes in the process by which talented people achieve individual success. It investigates how people rise to celebrity when they cannot or chose not to rely on traditional media entertainment industry infrastructures. It explores how, and to what extent, a more populist fame-making process is enabled. It studies the balance between celebrity manufactured for us, and celebrity manufactured by us.
Keywords: Entertainment; Social Media

John Deighton is The Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard Business School. He is an authority on consumer behavior and marketing, with a focus on digital and direct marketing. He teaches in the area of Big Data in Marketing, and previously initiated and  led the HBS Executive Education program in Digital Marketing and taught the elective MBA course, Digital Marketing Strategy.

His research on marketing management and consumer behavior has been published in a variety of journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Harvard Business Review. His research has also received a number of commendations, including the American Marketing Association’s Best Article Award for an article in the Journal of Marketing and an honorable mention from the Journal of interactive Marketing. He received the European Case Clearing House Award in Marketing (2012), the Edward N. Mayer, Jr. Award for Education Leadership (2011), the Direct Marketing Education Foundation Robert B. Clarke Outstanding Educator Award (2002), and the University of Chicago's Hillel J. Einhorn Excellence in Teaching Award (1995). He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the Judge School of Business at Cambridge University and the Said Business School at Oxford University.

He is a past editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, a leading outlet for scholarly research on consumer behavior, and was the founding co-editor of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, which reports academic research on marketing and the Internet. He is a past Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute, a member of the Chairman’s Advisory Council of Marketing Edge, and a Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He has been with HBS since 1994 and received the Greenhill Award for outstanding service to the school.

Prior to joining HBS, he was on the faculties of the University of Chicago and the Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth College). He has a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from the University of Cape Town. He also has a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Natal. His applied research includes consulting with a number of U.S and international corporations.

Featured Work
How Shein and Temu Conquered Fast Fashion
and Forged a New Business Model
The platforms Shein and Temu match consumer demand and factory output, bringing Chinese production to the rest of the world. The companies have remade fast fashion, but their pioneering approach has the potential to go far beyond retail by linking diverse small producers of all kinds of goods and services directly to diverse consumers across the globe.
Why Tik Tok is Beating YouTube for Eyeball Time
November 2022
Video clips might draw people to TikTok, but its algorithm keeps them watching. John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld explore why TikTok raced ahead of other platforms. First, it's not a social network, waiting to infer your interests from what your friends like. It's an entertainment network, serving you content similar to your revealed preferences. So things spread faster. Second it builds exploit-explore rules into the algorithm, so it's continuously reassessing its impression of what you find interesting. 
The Internet’s Effects on Consumption: Useful, Harmful, Playful
Afterword to Belk and Llama (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Digital Consumption
A unifying framework is presented for thinking about the diverse digital trnsformations of the past decade: their utilities, their harms, and their ability to reward play. Individual creativity has been liberated from corporate gatekeepers, and platforms have flourished to solve the perenial marketing problem of matching supply and demand. At the same time, as the flow of information at scale is made frictionless and permissionless, and business models rewards attention with advertising, bad actors have flourished.
The Socioeconomic Impact of Internet Tracking
At a time when the future of cookies in ad tracking is in doubt, this report contributes to understanding online tracking and its positive and negative consequences, both economic and social. We describe how tracking works to circulate data and affect privacy, how data circulation benefits the U.S. economy, how targeted advertising reduces inventory waste, the ways in which tracking affects aspects of the consumer web experience, and how the loss of tracking will produce multi-billion dollar revenue loss to independent publishers and their supporting technology infrastructure.
Rethinking the Profession Formerly Known as Advertising: How Data Science Is Disrupting the Work of Agencies
Speaker's Box, Journal of Advertising Research
“Speaker’s Box” invites academics and practitioners to identify potential areas of research affecting marketing and advertising. Its intention is to bridge the gap between the length of time it takes to produce rigorous work and the acceleration of change within practice. With this contribution, John Deighton shows how data technology sits within its industry, which he defines as the “commercial Internet.” He depicts this industry as a supply chain and shows how a small number of firms have defied the chain metaphor to integrate all the way from data source to data application. These integrators, he argues, are titans in a battle to create the dominant design for a platform on which all marketing will be practiced. But, he asks, who will do the work of marketing? Will it be done by an evolved version of the advertising agency; will it be institutionalized into the culture of data science; or will it not be professionalized at all but rather defer to one or more standard-setting industrialists, perhaps Google or Amazon?

Big Data

Big data is defined and distinguished from a mere moment in the “ancient quest to measure.” Specific discontinuities in the practice of information science are identified which, the paper argues, have large consequences for the social order. The infrastructure that runs on big data is described as diffusing with unprecedented speed but as being difficult to analyze and critique, and therefore the designers of society’s big data infrastructure, whether human or machines, play an unacknowledged legislative function of great consequence.

Adding Bricks to Clicks
Predicting the Patterns of Cross-Channel Elasticities Over Time
The authors propose a conceptual framework to explain whether and when the introduction of a new retail store channel helps or hurts sales in existing direct channels. A conceptual framework separates short- and long-term effects by analyzing the capabilities of a channel that help consumers accomplish their shopping goals. To test the theory, the authors analyze a unique data set from a high-end retailer using matching methods. The authors study the introduction of a retail store and find evidence of cross-channel cannibalization and synergy. The presence of a retail store decreases sales in the catalog but not the Internet channel in the short run but increases sales in both direct channels over time. Following the opening of the store, more first-time customers begin purchasing in the direct channels. These results suggest that adding a retail store to direct channels yields different results from adding an Internet channel to a retail store channel, as previous research has indicated.

Journal of Marketing, May 2012, Vol. 76, No. 3: pp. 96-111
The Value of Data
Consequences for Insight, Innovation and Efficiency in the U.S. Economy
Professor Deighton was the lead author on a new study entitled "The Value of Data: Consequences for Insight, Innovation, and Efficiency in the U.S. Economy".  The study investigates the amount of incremental value data-driven marketing contributes to the U.S. economy and also estimates the proportion of the value that is accounted for by the flow or transfer of data among firms.  For more information or to download the study click here.
Economic Value of the Advertising-Supported Internet Ecosystem
This 105 page report analyzes the structure and dynamics of the commercial internet by classifying individually the internet-dependent revenues and employment of the 412 largest firms that participate in the ecosystem, and rolling up smaller firms and individuals. The report concludes that about 4 million jobs in the U.S. depend on the internet, of which 43% comprise small firms and self-employed individuals. The report identifies the most rapidly growing sectors by comparing this report to earlier reports published in 2008 and 2012. The commercial internet has been growing at 20% per year over the duration of the three studies, and its share of U.S. GDP appears to be increasing over that period.
Learning to Become a Taste Expert
Evidence suggests that consumers seek to become more expert about hedonic products to enhance their enjoyment of future consumption occasions. Current approaches to becoming an expert center on cultivating an analytic mindset. In the present research the authors explore the benefit to enthusiasts of moving beyond analytics to cultivate a holistic style of processing. In the taste context the authors define holistic processing as non-verbal, imagery based, and involving narrative processing. The authors conduct qualitative interviews with taste experts (Master Sommeliers) to operationalize the holistic approach to hedonic learning, and then test it against traditional analytic methods in a series of experiments across a range of hedonic products. The results suggest that hedonic learning follows a sequence of stages whose order matters and that the holistic stage is facilitated by attending to experience as a narrative event and by employing visual imagery. The results of this multi-method investigation have implications for both managers and academics interested in how consumers learn to become expert in hedonic product categories.
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
  • Deighton, John A., and Leora Kornfeld. "The Internet's Effects on Consumption: Useful, Harmful, Playful." Afterword to The Routledge Handbook of Digital Consumption. 2nd ed., edited by Rosa Llamas and Russell Belk, 529–539. Routledge, 2022. View Details
  • Deighton, John. "Consumer Identity Motives in the Information Age." Chap. 12 in Inside Consumption: Consumer Motives, Goals, and Desires, edited by S. Ratneshwar and David Glen Mick, 233 – 250. New York: Routledge, 2005. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A. "Market Solutions to Privacy Problems?" Chap. 6 in Digital Anonymity and the Law - Tensions and Dimensions. Vol. II, edited by C. Nicoll, J.E.J. Prins, and M.J.M. van Dellen, 137 – 146. Information Technology & Law Series. The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, 2003. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A., and Patrick Barwise. "Digital Marketing Communication." In Digital Marketing: Global Strategies from the World's Leading Experts, edited by Jerry Wind and Vijay Mahajan. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A. "Service Markets and the Internet." In Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy, edited by Christopher Lovelock. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A. "Frequency Programs in Service Industries." Chap. 24 in Handbook of Services Marketing and Management, edited by Dawn Iacobucci and Teresa A. Swartz, 401–407. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A., and Patrick Barwise. "Digital Media: Cutting Through the Hype." In Financial Times Mastering Marketing: The Complete MBA Companion in Marketing, edited by Tim Dickson. London: Pearson Education, 1999. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A. "The Concept of Integrated Marketing Communications." In The Advertising Business: Operations, Creativity, Media Planning, Integrated Communications, edited by John Philip Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999. View Details
  • Deighton, John. "Integrated Marketing Communications in Practice." Chap. 33 in The Advertising Business: Operations, Creativity, Media Planning, Integrated Communications, edited by John Philip Jones, 339–355. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A. "Features of Good Integration: Two Cases and Some Generalizations." In Integrated Communications: The Search for Synergy in Communication Voices, edited by J. Moore and E. Thorsen. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A., Don Peppers, and Martha Rogers. "Customer Transaction Databases: Present Status and Prospects." In The Marketing Information Revolution, edited by Robert C. Blattberg, Rashi Glazer, and John Little. Cambridge: Marketing Science Institute, 1994. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A. "Managing Services When Service Is a Performance." In Service Quality: New Directions in Theory and Practice, edited by R. T. Trust and R. L. Oliver. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1994. View Details
  • McQueen, J., J. Foley, and J. A. Deighton. "Decomposing a Brand's Customer Franchise into Buyer Types." In Brand Equity and Advertising: Advertising's Role in Building Strong Brands, edited by D. A. Aaker and A. L. Hillsdale. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A., and S. Hoch. "Teaching Emotion with Drama Advertising." In Advertising Exposure, Memory and Choice, edited by A. A. Mitchell. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. View Details
  • Deighton, J. A., L. F. Alwitt, and J. Grimm. "Reactions to Political Advertising Depend on the Nature of the Voter-Candidate Bond." In Television and Political Advertising. Vol. 1, edited by F. Biocca. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991. View Details
Working Papers
Cases and Teaching Materials
Other Publications and Materials
Research Summary
Overview
Professor Deighton conducts research at the intersection of information technology and marketing. He is interested in the complementary uses of human and artificial intelligence and creativity in areas such as advertising, content creation, and online retailing. He studies, on one hand, how data, particularly data that profiles individuals and depicts their social relationships, is gathered, processed, and applied by firms to acquire and retain customers. On the other hand, he studies how people manage their privacy and its obverse, their identities.
Keywords: Marketing; Media; Information Technology; Advertising Industry; Communications Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Information Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Publishing Industry; North and Central America; Asia; Europe
Personal Data in Marketing
Between 10% and 20% of all marketing activity in the United States, and a smaller proportion internationally, relies on data about individuals, whether personally identifying or pseudonomized. These data flow across a system of established and emerging firms operating as an industriy whose raw material is information about people and whose output is efficient matching of sellers to buyers.  This research project is concerned with questions of public policy and corporate strategy. The research investigates the industry's value chain, its sub-structures, its pattern of evolution, and its future.  It considers regulation and legislation, and will examine the comparative effects of regulatory regimes.
Keywords: Data; Personal Data; Information Technology; Industry Structure; Marketing
Anonymity and Identity
In most consumer markets, consumers are accustomed to operating in relative anonymity. A complex social adjustment is occurring as people realize that anonymity is often no longer their default condition - it must be sought and in some cases bought. New conceptions of privacy are being constructed by processes of public policymaking and marketplace negotiation in settings that range from healthcare to security in air travel to email spam. This research is building a conceptual framework and empirical evidence on consumer preferences for anonymity and identity.
Keywords: Privacy; Anonymity
Social Media and Their Consequences
Social media have had negative consequences for entertainment industries such as music and motion pictures, but they have had positive implications too. This project is concerned with one aspect of these social media effects: changes in the process by which talented people achieve individual success. It investigates how people rise to celebrity when they cannot or chose not to rely on traditional media entertainment industry infrastructures. It explores how, and to what extent, a more populist fame-making process is enabled. It studies the balance between celebrity manufactured for us, and celebrity manufactured by us.
Keywords: Entertainment; Social Media
Teaching
Marketing Strategies for Profitable Growth—China
Maintaining quality standards and sustaining profitable growth in China's rapidly evolving marketplace requires powerful marketing strategies that enable organizations to build and nurture long-term customer relationships. To help executives meet this challenge, this course focuses on the critical marketing components required to compete both in China and globally and explores the leading marketing practices from around the world that can be applied to create and sustain competitive advantage in Asia and beyond.

Related Link: Marketing Strategies for Profitable Growth (HBS Exec Ed)
Digital Marketing Strategy

When the tools of marketing change, strategies change too. The focus of this course is on firms trying to navigate the transition from offline to online market-making and strategy development. Our concern is primarily with corporations that have products and services to sell, and secondarily with the challenges of developing the tools of digital marketing.

Digital media, and in particular social media like Youtube, Facebook, Blogs, and Twitter, represent radically new tools for reaching customers, collaborating with them, building relationships, and spreading ideas virally. Paid search advertising tools like Google's Adsense make "free to consumer" a strategic option. Digital distribution channels change the relationship between manufacturers and retailers, and destabilize entire industry ecosystems, This course examines how pioneering corporations are using these tools to build digital marketing and Web branding strategies for large companies and small, and the course identifies techniques and frameworks to generalize from these pioneering practices.

The course teaches how to use search engine marketing, social media display advertising, and mobile display advertising, with the help of a hands-on class project in which real funds are spent to achieve in-market results. Next it uses cases on viral propagation to teach some of the mechanics by which social media transmit and create persuasive content. Third, the course explores how marketing companies adopt some of the methods of digital age publishers to disintermediate traditional publishers and take content directly to their customers and prospects.

The career focus of students taking the course is likely to include both people with an interest in Web-based entrepreneurship, but also people interested in general consumer marketing and general management careers. Given the way marketing media are evolving and patterns of consumer engagement with media are changing, our goal as a class will be to anticipate trends that, while novel and relatively unexplored today, will be mainstream in the next decade.

Awards & Honors
Winner of the 2020 Louis W. Stern Award from the American Marketing Association for “Adding Bricks to Clicks: Predicting the Patterns of Cross-Channel Elasticities over Time” (Journal of Marketing, 2012) with Jill Avery, Thomas Steenburgh, and Mary Caravella.
Won a 2012 European Case Clearing House (ecch) Award in the Marketing category for his case "Dove: Evolution of a Brand" (HBS Case 508-047).
Received the 2011 Edward N. Mayer Jr. Education Leadership Award from the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation (DMEF).
Received the 2002 Robert B. Clarke Outstanding Educator Award from the Direct Marketing Education Foundation.
Received the Hillel J. Einhorn Excellence in Teaching Award in 1995.
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