Exceeding Consumer Expectations - Publications - Faculty & Research

18 Sep 2017
Research & Ideas

'Likes' Lead to Nothing—and Other Hard-Learned Lessons of Social Media Marketing

increased by 200 percent in the past eight years, rising from 3.5 percent of marketing budgets in 2009 to 10.5 percent in February 2017, according to The CMO Survey 2017. And that upward climb is expected to continue: Marketers say they... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Advertising; Technology

11 May 2016
Research & Ideas

Fix This! Why is it so Painful to Buy a New Car?

(Editor’s note: Fix This! is a series of occasional stories about industries that provide bad consumer experiences and how they can be fixed.) Consumers routinely list buying a car as the worst shopping... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Auto

23 Oct 2000
Research & Ideas

The Strategy-Focused Organization

far short of the budget. In April 1995, McCool led a meeting at headquarters to review the first quarter's results. People entered the room trembling, as they knew that financial performance would be below expectations and that, in the... View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton

06 Jan 2014
Research & Ideas

Technology Re-Emergence: Creating New Value for Old Innovations

brand of colorful Swatch watches. A portmanteau of "second watch," Swatch essentially introduced the idea of an inexpensive quartz watch as a fashion accessory. The strategy was wildly successful, with sales exceeding 50 million... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

16 Feb 2010
Research & Ideas

The Outside-In Approach to Customer Service

would not have risen to what is now, a $2.5-billion-a-year industry, without a revolutionary shift to outside-in thinking that allowed companies such as Fresh Express to realize that busy consumers wanted companies to make the whole salad... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Consumer Products

26 May 2022
HBS Case

Apple vs. Feds: Is iPhone Privacy a Basic Human Right?

expectation that a company will have a position on social and political issues." A Harvard Business School case study and its revision, Apple: Privacy vs. Safety (A) and (B), illustrates the complex ramifications that companies should... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

February 2024
Teaching Note

Accelerating with Caution: Forecasting and Managing birddogs' Growth (A) and (B)

By: Mark Egan

Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 224-023 and 224-024. As 2017 was drawing to a close, birddogs’ founder and CEO, Peter Baldwin, was working with his CFO Jack Sullivan to prepare for 2018. A nascent direct-to-consumer apparel brand, birddogs had carved its niche in men’s... View Details

Keywords: Inventory Management; Forecasting Demand; Financial Constraints; Apparel; Startups; Corporate Finance; Forecasting and Prediction; Working Capital; Financing and Loans; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Demand and Consumers; Apparel and Accessories Industry; United States

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06 Jul 2023
News

Lessons from Major League Baseball's Game-Changing Innovations

to watch the end of the game, and expect to go to school the next day. And so we really felt like we had to condense the action, make it crisper, and then try to incentivize some of the things that we know fans want to see, stolen bases... View Details

29 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

Is There a Method to Musk’s Madness on Twitter?

for misleading consumers on how they planned to use their personal information. On Friday Twitter executives who served on a governance board the FTC had ordered into existence left the company, prompting Senate Democrats to urge the FTC... View Details

Keywords: by Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette; Technology

Web

Topics - HBS Working Knowledge

Complexity (3) Conflict Management (4) Conflict and Resolution (13) Conflict of Interests (1) Construction (1) Consumer Behavior (173) Contracts (7) Cooperation (3) Cooperative Ownership (1) Copyright (2) Core Relationships (1) Corporate... View Details

30 May 2023
Research & Ideas

Can AI Predict Whether Shoppers Would Pick Crest or Colgate?

commercially available version of GPT-3 to elicit thousands of simulated customer responses and found that AI can produce demand patterns that resemble those of human studies. “Utilizing this tool, which is in some ways a consumer... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

16 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

Restaurant Revolution: How the Industry Is Fighting to Stay Alive

consumers in the dining area. On average, restaurants spend 30 percent of their revenue on labor. With increasing focus on fair wages and legislated wage increases, restaurants may easily exceed that average. Moreover, restaurants spend... View Details

Keywords: by Michael S. Kaufman, Lena G. Goldberg, and Jill Avery; Food & Beverage

14 Dec 2007
Op-Ed

When Your Product Becomes a Commodity

speed from launch to maturity is faster than ever before. Marketers can do three things to delay the inevitable forces of commoditization. Innovate. A new product that better meets consumer needs, even an upgrade of an existing product,... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

03 Jun 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Platforms and Limits to Network Effects

Keywords: by Hanna Halaburda & Mikolaj Jan Piskorski

04 May 2021
Book

Best Buy: How Human Connection Saved a Failing Retailer

we were colleagues, yes, but we were also human beings, and most of us were aligned on this idea of doing something good in the world. So we said, ‘Let’s use Best Buy as a platform for that.’” Instead of seeing the company as a consumer... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

May–June 2021
Article

Capturing Value in Platform Business Models that Rely on User-Generated Content

By: Hemang Subramanian, Sabyasachi Mitra and Sam Ransbotham

Business models increasingly depend on inputs from outside traditional organizational boundaries. For example, platforms that generate revenue from advertising, subscription, or referral fees often rely on user-generated content (UGC). But there is considerable... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Network Effects; Mergers and Acquisitions; Valuation; Risk and Uncertainty

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15 Nov 2022
Book

Stop Ignoring Bad Behavior: 6 Tips for Better Ethics at Work

which publishes in November, can provide important lessons for business people in an era where consumers expects companies to behave responsibly more than ever. Enabling unethical behavior In the case of... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

21 Sep 2010
First Look

First Look: September 21, 2010

channels are more likely to use decision-making authority in the granting and structuring of consumer loans than those who are not. Conditional on using decision-making authority, their decisions are also less risky ex post. These... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

20 Mar 2012
First Look

First Look: March 20

either system can lead to the subversion of expected relationships in the other. This book rejects the simple equation of capitalism with markets or with trade, in favor of a three-level system that embraces factor markets as well those... View Details