Publications
Publications
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(3,384)
- Faculty Publications (770)
- October 2016 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
DataXu: Selling Ad Tech
By: Frank V. Cespedes, John Deighton, Lisa Cox and Olivia Hull
DataXu served marketers by buying digital advertising for brands using its demand-side platform. It sought a way to build a more predictable revenue stream in the very transactional media marketplace, and hoped that two new marketing analytics products would give it a... View Details
- September 2016 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
Casper Sleep Inc.: Marketing the 'One Perfect Mattress for Everyone'
By: Robert J. Dolan
“A Warby Parker of mattresses? Somebody is going to do it. Why not us?”
This was the topic of a conversation begun in spring 2013 among Gabe Flateman, Philip Krim, Neil Parikh, and T. Luke Sherwin. The four met as members of a New York City venture accelerator... View Details
Keywords: Mattress; Sleep; Marketing; Business Model; Marketing Channels; Adoption; Sales; Consumer Products Industry
- September 2016
- Supplement
ZenRecruit: Sales Coaching and Performance Reviews
By: Mark N. Roberge
Amara Kaggwa leads the small but rapidly expanding sales team at ZenRecruit, a recruiting software application used by small businesses. Armed with six months of sales performance metrics, Kaggwa is preparing for her monthly performance conversations with two... View Details
- September 2016 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
ZenRecruit: Sales Coaching and Performance Reviews
By: Mark Roberge
Amara Kaggwa leads the small but rapidly expanding sales team at ZenRecruit, a recruiting software application used by small businesses. Armed with six months of sales performance metrics, Kaggwa is preparing for her monthly performance conversations with two... View Details
- August 2016
- Teaching Note
Mahindra Lifespace Developers' Venture into Affordable Housing
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Monica Baraldi
Mahindra Lifespace Developers Limited (MLDL) was the infrastructure and real estate arm of the Mahindra Group, an Indian conglomerate with revenues of $16.5 billion in 2014. Employing 400 experts in land acquisition, design, project management, sales and marketing, and... View Details
Keywords: Business Conglomerates; Business Startups; Development Economics; Developing Countries and Economies; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Housing; Emerging Markets; Business and Government Relations; Human Needs; Social Issues; Urban Development; Real Estate Industry; India
- August 2016 (Revised August 2017)
- Case
AnswerDash (Abridged)
By: Elie Ofek and Jeffrey D. Shulman
It is 2014 and AnswerDash, a startup backed by venture capital, has not seen the widespread adoption of their online self-service customer support solution that they were expecting based on early success in helping clients save and generate substantial amounts of... View Details
Keywords: Pricing; Economic Value Estimation; Price Metrics; Organizational Selling; Innovation Adoption; Business To Business; Marketing; Customer Lifetime Value; Venture Capital; Customer Relationship Management; Price; Marketing Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Technology Adoption; Business Startups; Sales; Innovation and Invention; Product Marketing; Financial Services Industry
- July 2016
- Supplement
Mahindra Tool: Project Economics
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Christopher Payton
The case describes Mahindra Lifespace Developers’ (MLDL), a unit of Indian conglomerate Mahindra and Mahindra, foray into the affordable housing segment. MLDL sees a huge opportunity in selling apartments to the burgeoning population of urban workers, which is badly... View Details
Keywords: Business Conglomerates; Business Startups; Development Economics; Developing Countries and Economies; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Housing; Emerging Markets; Business and Government Relations; Human Needs; Social Issues; Urban Development; Real Estate Industry; India
- July 2016 (Revised October 2016)
- Case
Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing Vignettes
By: Mark Roberge and Frank Cespedes
Which sales candidate is a startup’s ideal first hire? What marketing channels are best to invest in? How aggressively should an executive team align sales with customer success? Early stage founders, sales leaders, and marketing executives often face one, and... View Details
- June 2016
- Case
Macy's Reinvents Its Millennial Business
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
Molly Langenstein, Macy’s executive vice president for fashion and new business development, and members of Macy’s senior team were rethinking the company’s approach to serving millennial customers, customers born between the years of 1980 and 2000. To tackle this... View Details
- June 2016 (Revised August 2017)
- Case
AnswerDash
By: Elie Ofek and Jeffrey D. Shulman
It is 2014, and AnswerDash, a startup backed by venture capital, has not seen the widespread adoption of their online self-service customer support solution that they were expecting based on early success in helping clients save and generate substantial amounts of... View Details
Keywords: Pricing; Economic Value Estimation; Price Metrics; Organizational Selling; Innovation Adoption; Business To Business; Marketing; Customer Lifetime Value; Venture Capital; Customer Relationship Management; Price; Marketing Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Technology Adoption; Business Startups; Sales; Innovation and Invention; Product Marketing; Financial Services Industry
- June 2016
- Teaching Plan
Terrapin Laboratory
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Andrew Otazo
This teaching plan accompanies the case "Terrapin Laboratory," HBS No. 315-098. That case describes the formation and rapid growth of a drug testing company. The company needs to decide whether to enter the painkiller testing market, in addition to growing its drug... View Details
- May 2016 (Revised April 2019)
- Case
Olivia Lum: Wanting to Save the World
By: Geoffrey Jones and Essie Alamsyah
This case considers the entrepreneurial career of Olivia Lum, who founded the Singaporean water company Hyflux in 1989. An orphan born in Malaysia, Lum provides a rare case of an entrepreneurial success in a country whose economic success has primarily rested on... View Details
Keywords: Industrial Organization; Chinitz; Agglomeration; Clusters; Cities; Mine; Environmental Management; Operations Management; Sustainable Operations; Environmental Regulation; Entrepreneurship; Globalization; History; Operations; Management; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology Industry; Utilities Industry; China; Singapore
- April 2016
- Teaching Note
Cree Inc.: Introducing the LED Light Bulb
By: John Gourville and Michael Norris
This case is taught as part of the first year required marketing course in the Harvard Business School's MBA program. This course is built around the "Four Ps," with modules focusing on product, promotion, place, and pricing. The Cree case is used in the product policy... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Reference Wars: Encyclopedia Britannica's Decline and Encarta's Emergence
By: Shane Greenstein
The experience of Encyclopædia Britannica provides the canonical example of the decline of an established firm at the outset of the digital age. Competition from Microsoft's Encarta in 1993 led to sharp declines in the sales of books, which led to the distressed sale... View Details
- March 2016 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Fair & Lovely vs. Dark is Beautiful
By: Rohit Deshpande and Saloni Chaturvedi
Women of Worth (WOW) is an organization that seeks to empower women through training and workshops. The organization has also fought against discrimination based on the color of a person's skin through its “Dark is Beautiful” campaign—endorsed by well-known... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
InsightSquared: Developing the Sales and Marketing Plan
By: Mark Roberge, Tom Eisenmann and Frank Cespedes
Fred Shilmover and Sam Clemens prepared for their fourth quarter board meeting. They were excited to have scaled their software startup, InsightSquared, to $2 million in revenue and secured an $8 million round of venture capital. However, they disagreed on the path... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised April 2019)
- Supplement
InsightSquared: Developing the Sales and Marketing Plan Courseware
By: Mark N. Roberge
These are Excel spreadsheets of Exhibit 3-6 from the InsightSquared: Developing the Sales and Marketing Plan case #816074. View Details
- February 2016 (Revised September 2017)
- Case
Mohamed Azab and Seha Capital
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Sarah McAra
In January 2011, Mohamed Azab, founder and CEO of health care investment firm Seha Capital, made his first health care investment in Hassab Labs, a diagnostic lab in Alexandria, Egypt. Weeks later, a revolution erupted across the country as the Arab Spring swept... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Mattermark
By: Jeffrey Bussgang and Annelena Lobb
Mattermark, a software-as-a-service company that sold software allowing companies to access financial information about privately-held companies and startups, was at a turning point. CEO Danielle Morrill had to allocate investment funding from a Series A round. She... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Bidding for Finansbank
By: David Scharfstein and Esel Çekin
Because of the deepening Greek crisis, in October 2015, National Bank of Greece (NBG) was required to sell one of its most valuable assets, Finansbank, the eighth largest Turkish bank. There were three potential buyers: Garanti Bank, Turkey's second largest private... View Details