Messaging - Publications - Faculty & Research

20 Feb 2006
HBS Case

Oprah: A Case Study Comes Alive

March 2005, Winfrey phoned Koehn precisely as arranged, and the interview, originally scheduled for twenty minutes, lasted an hour and twenty minutes. Koehn reflected, "Her message to our case was about purpose: one's purpose and... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Media & Broadcasting; Consumer Products; Entertainment & Recreation

16 Jun 2003
Research & Ideas

Historical Perspective: Levitt Shaped the Debate

Agree or disagree—and even his colleagues disagree—Theodore Levitt's controversial article "The Globalization of Markets" reshaped the debate on globalism and consumer marketing, and continues to provide modern managers with constructive ways to view markets.... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

27 Dec 2010
Research & Ideas

HBS Faculty on 2010’s Biggest Business Developments

networks is to middle managers, who may become obsolete when layers of managers are no longer needed to convey messages up and down the organization.” A year ago many people poked fun at Facebook as a place where kids shared their latest... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

15 Nov 2006
Research & Ideas

Lessons Not Learned About Innovation

money." What's the central message here? A: In 2002, Arrow Electronics attempted a new Internet venture, Arrow.com. The group was granted perks not given to others, and this did not go unnoticed by the sales group, which was already... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

17 Dec 2001
Research & Ideas

Enterprising Women

While many characteristics that mark a successful entrepreneur are gender blind, being a woman does make a difference, and recognizing and utilizing those differences is an equally important quality to cultivate when building a new venture. That was the View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

06 Jan 2012
Op-Ed

Where Green Corporate Ratings Fail

News Corporation—a multinational media conglomerate that includes BSKYB, Dow Jones, Fox News, 20th Century Fox and Star, among other units—announced earlier this year that it has become climate neutral, meaning that its operations have no net impact on global climate... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Toffel & Auden Schendler; Information; Publishing

17 Jun 2013
Research & Ideas

Advertising Symbiosis: The Key to Viral Videos

Old Spice's Twitter campaign. In 2010, Procter & Gamble launched a campaign where Facebook and Twitter users were encouraged to send messages to Isaiah Mustafa, the strapping spokesman for Old Spice who markets the idea that if men... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Advertising

06 Jul 2015
Research & Ideas

Money and Quotas Motivate the Sales Force Best

randomly by branch, interspersed with control weeks. At the beginning of a test week, the company would send a text message to members of the sales force in a given branch, telling those employees they were getting a certain bonus. The... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Retail

09 Feb 2018
Research & Ideas

Big Hits: The Best of the 2018 Super Bowl Ads

audience’s attention and empathy, but that failed to offer a compelling reason to believe in and purchase the product. A notable exception was an ad for E-Trade that deftly used many Americans’ post-Great Recession concerns about the safety of their retirement savings... View Details

Keywords: Re: Multiple Faculty; Telecommunications

01 Oct 2001
What Do You Think?

Will Information Technology Really Turn Organizations Upside Down This Time?

Summing Up Do not read too much into a possible relationship between the development of information technology and the incidence of "upside-down" management. That's the overwhelming message from responses to the column raising... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

10 Mar 2015
First Look

First Look: March 10

Diversity and Inclusion (D&I), provided a summary of the firm's journey to date and an update on its progress. The message from Fink at the July meeting was clear: the firm needed to do more. This View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

09 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

The Manager’s Guide to Communicating with Customers Collection

to craft a more effective message to, and to get lucrative insights from, the shopping public would be well advised to listen to what Underhill and Zaltman have to say. Following are some of their communication secrets. Examine the View Details

Keywords: by Richard Bierck; Retail

06 Jul 2009
Research & Ideas

Conducting Layoffs: ’Necessary Evils’ at Work

them the news is empathic and caring. However, the message must also be delivered in a clear and direct way. In an effort to be compassionate, and out of a desire not to appear hard-hearted, it is all too easy to try to sugarcoat the... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

27 Jul 2019
Op-Ed

Does Facebook's Business Model Threaten Our Elections?

In the 2012 US presidential election, the Obama campaign deftly used a Facebook app to register voters and have friends message them to get out the vote. But it was 2016 presidential campaign that really changed social media’s impact on... View Details

Keywords: by George Riedel

16 May 2016
HBS Case

Food Safety Economics: The Cost of a Sick Customer

period of flat revenues or declining revenues, that sends a message to everybody in the food industry ” China, for example, has seen its share of well-publicized cases of food contamination. In 2008, melamine was found in milk products... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Food & Beverage

23 Nov 1999
Research & Ideas

What’s Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge?

mail messages with them and checked Bain's "people finder" database for more contacts. Eventually she connected with nine partners and several managers who had developed growth strategies for financial services institutions. She... View Details

Keywords: by Morten T. Hansen, Nitin Nohria & Thomas Tierney; Consulting

05 Nov 2024
Research & Ideas

AI Can Help Leaders Communicate, But Can't Make Employees Listen

for AI acceptance: messages simply labeled as coming from AI were rated as less helpful than those that actually came from a chatbot. “My prediction is that every single employee one day will have their own communication bot, just like... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Information Technology; Technology

02 Nov 2016
What Do You Think?

Are Employees Becoming Job 'Renters' Instead of 'Owners'?

because it sends a message to other managers about the importance of assuming an ownership mentality toward the business and its customers. Flash forward to the recent disclosure by the leadership of Wells Fargo that it fired 5,300 of its... View Details