Publications

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April 2011 (Revised January 2015)
Case

The Eleganzia Group

By: Elie Ofek, Elena Corsi, Bharat Sajnani, Sorina Casian-Botez and Francesco Tronci

Eleganzia Group management faces tough decisions heading into the summer of 2010. With tourism on the decline due to the global economic recession, General Manager Giannuzzi must decide how to set prices at the Forte Village Resort, the Group's most well-known... View Details

Keywords: Pricing; Pricing Strategy; Customer Management; Branding; Customer Relationship Management; Price; Luxury; Business Strategy; Brands and Branding; Accommodations Industry; Travel Industry; Italy

23 Dec 2002
Research & Ideas

Partnering and the Balanced Scorecard

and friendly employees. Mobil decided to focus its marketing efforts on building long-term relationships with such consumers. It developed loyalty programs, based on a new... View Details

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

January–February 2023
Article

Triadic Advocacy Work

By: Summer R. Jackson and Katherine C. Kellogg

Scholars of street-level bureaucracy and institutional research focus primarily on the relationships between advocates and their larger bureaucratic and social systems, assuming that advocates have little need to satisfy their beneficiaries. We find otherwise in our... View Details

Keywords: Occupations And Professions; Ethnography; Power And Politics; Work And Organizations; Advocacy; Public Management; Justice

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April 2018
Teaching Note

InsideSales.com (A) and (B)

By: Frank Cespedes

Teaching Note for HBS Nos. 817-018 and 817-042. InsideSales.com (ISC) has been successful selling its software to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB). But for various reasons, the founders see “the next stage of growth” as building a scalable sales and service... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Customer Relationship Management; Growth Management; Marketing Strategy; Salesforce Management; Talent and Talent Management; Technology Industry

January 2009 (Revised June 2010)
Case

Cisco Systems (2001): Building and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture

By: Ranjay Gulati

Customer centricity has been an important part of the culture at Cisco Systems since its inception. While part of this is attributable to values put in place by the founders and retained by subsequent management, it is also closely interwoven with its organizational... View Details

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Organizational Culture; Research and Development; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Employees; Brands and Branding; Customer Relationship Management; Business Units

November 2004 (Revised September 2007)
Case

The Mitchell Family and Mitchells/Richards

By: Amy C. Edmondson, John A. Davis, Corey B. Hajim and Kelly Mulderry

Describes a small, luxury retail chain's operational sophistication achieved through the use of technology and "high-touch" customer service. A family-run business, Mitchells has built its success with a customer service strategy known internally as "hugging." The term... View Details

Keywords: Family Business; Customer Relationship Management; Knowledge Management; Service Delivery; Organizational Culture; Expansion; Information Technology; Retail Industry

July–August 2024
Article

Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response, which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details

Keywords: Long-run Targeting; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Statistical Surrogacy; Customer Churn; Field Experiments; Consumer Behavior; Customer Focus and Relationships; AI and Machine Learning; Marketing Strategy

22 Jun 2021
Research & Ideas

The COVID-19 Mutiny: When Teams Leave and Take Their Clients

zero-sum dynamic at play. This is true even—especially—if all relationships had been collegial and warm. Some of the worst legal mistakes are made out of a desire to be open View Details

Keywords: by Robin Abrahams, Boris Groysberg, and Steven L. Manchel

November 2016 (Revised March 2018)
Module Note

Strategy Execution Module 9: Building a Balanced Scorecard

By: Robert Simons

This module reading explains how to construct a strategy map and build a balanced scorecard. Using an internal value chain model, the module illustrates how a balanced scorecard can support and enable customer management, innovation, operations, and post-sale service... View Details

Keywords: Management Control Systems; Implementing Strategy; Execution; Performance Measurement; Strategy Map; Business Goals; Customer Measures; Strategy; Balanced Scorecard; Business Model

March 2010
Article

Calculating, Creating, and Claiming Value in Business Markets: Status and Research Agenda

By: Gary L. Lilien, Rajdeep Grewal, Douglas Bowman, Min Ding, Abbie Griffin, V. Kumar, Das Narayandas, Renana Peres, Raji Srinivasan and Qiong Wang

A key challenge facing business marketers surrounds developing a deeper understanding of customer needs. We conceptualize that challenge as having three dimensions: calculating, creating, and claiming value. We discuss key problems, new developments and research... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Problems and Challenges; Research; Customer Relationship Management

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March 2008
Background Note

Marketing Input and Innovation Strategy

By: Elie Ofek

This note develops a framework for considering the challenges of incorporating marketing input when setting innovation strategy. The framework lays out the possible innovation opportunities a firm can entertain and describes how the customer knowledge gained from... View Details

Keywords: Customer Focus and Relationships; Innovation Strategy; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Marketing; Research; Competition

Teaching Interest

Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD)

By: Ethan S. Bernstein

Professor Bernstein taught Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD) from 2013-2016 (7 sections). This course focuses on how managers become effective leaders by addressing the human side of enterprise.

The course is divided into five modules:View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Organizations; Personal Development and Career; Relationships; Communication

10 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

Technology and COVID Upended Tipping Norms. Will Consumers Keep Paying?

if they tipped at all, throwing it into a jar on the counter.” Formerly, tipping was limited to waitstaff at sit-down restaurants, says Avery, an expert in customer relationship management. And, “In the US,... View Details

Keywords: by Anna Lamb, Harvard Gazette

15 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

Infographic: Can I Please Speak to an Actual Person?

Based on the Working Paper, Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety through Access to Human Contact (pdf) by Michelle A. Shell and Ryan W. Buell. Shell is a doctoral student at Harvard Business... View Details

Keywords: by Katherine Vizcardo and Danielle Kost; Service

09 Jul 2007
Research & Ideas

Five Steps to Better Family Negotiations

Negotiations between family members who own a business are different—different from negotiations between non-family members and also different from negotiations between family members who don't have a business. This is because family... View Details

Keywords: by John A. Davis and Deepak Malhotra

10 Jan 2005
Research & Ideas

Motivation and the Cross-Sector Alliance

relationships to attain the desired outcome. Of comparable importance is an understanding of why the other partner wishes to engage in the collaboration so that the participant can be responsive to those goals View Details

Keywords: by James Austin, Ezequiel Reficco & SEKN research team

March–April 2013
Article

Unlocking Innovation Through Business Experimentation

By: Stefan Thomke

There is a downside to businesses that focus heavily on standardization, optimization, and driving out variability: Such organizations leave themselves vulnerable to underinvesting in experimentation and variation, which are the lifeblood of innovation. Good... View Details

Keywords: Experimentation; Innovation Management; Learning And Development; Research; Innovation and Management; Business Processes

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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

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