Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,670)
- Faculty Publications (524)
- March 2010 (Revised November 2010)
- Case
Pandora Radio: Fire Unprofitable Customers?
By: Willy C. Shih and Halle Alicia Tecco
Pandora Radio is at a crossroads. Founder Tim Westergren has just been told by a well known VC to get rid of his unprofitable customers in order to get his costs down, but Westergren is not sure that such actions are consistent with his company's business model.... View Details
- January 2010 (Revised March 2013)
- Case
HubSpot: Lower Churn through Greater CHI
By: F. Asis Martinez Jerez, Thomas Steenburgh, Jill Avery and Lisa Brem
HubSpot, a web marketing startup is under pressure from VCs to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. In the case, students explore the drivers of customer churn and uncover opportunities to increase customer retention across the... View Details
- January 2010 (Revised August 2011)
- Case
United Breaks Guitars
By: John A. Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
When social media propagate a complaint about poor customer service, an international media event ensues. How do viral videos spread and what can firms do about them? This case dissects an incident in which a disgruntled customer used YouTube and Twitter to spread a... View Details
- Article
Are Self-service Customers Satisfied or Stuck?
This paper investigates the impact of self-service technology (SST) usage on customer satisfaction and retention. Specifically, we disentangle the distinct effects of satisfaction and switching costs as drivers of retention among self-service customers. Our empirical... View Details
- Article
Exploration and Exploitation within and across Organizations
By: Dovev Lavie, Uriel Stettner and Michael Tushman
Jim March's framework of exploration and exploitation has drawn substantial interest from scholars studying phenomena such as organizational learning, knowledge management, innovation, organizational design, and strategic alliances. This framework has become an... View Details
- 2010
- Book
One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making
By: Steven Sinofsky and Marco Iansiti
Learn from the concepts, capabilities, processes, and behaviors that aligned around one strategy with the hard-won, first-person wisdom found in One Strategy. Challenging traditional views of strategy and operational execution, this book - written by Microsoft... View Details
- Article
The Cost Structure, Customer Profitability, and Retention Implications of Self-Service Distribution Channels: Evidence from Customer Behavior in an Online Banking Channel
By: Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei
This paper uses the context of online banking to investigate the consequences of employing self-service distribution channels to alter customer interactions with the firm. Using a sample of retail banking customers observed over a 30-month period at a large U.S. bank,... View Details
- March 2010
- Article
The Desire to Win: The Effects of Competitive Arousal on Motivation and Behavior
By: Deepak Malhotra
The paper theoretically elaborates and empirically investigates the "competitive arousal" model of decision making, which argues that elements of the strategic environment (e.g., head-to-head rivalry and time pressure) can fuel competitive motivations and behavior.... View Details
- 2010
- Article
The Strategic Use of Brand Biographies
By: Jill Avery, Neeru Paharia, Anat Keinan and Juliet Schor
We introduce the concept of a brand biography to describe an emerging trend in branding in which firms author a dynamic, historical account of the events that have shaped the brand over time. Using a particular type of brand biography, "the underdog," we empirically... View Details
Keywords: Marketing; Brands; Brand Management; Brand Building; Brand Positioning; Competitive Positioning; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Managerial Roles; Strategy; Product Positioning; Consumer Behavior; Biography; Success; Perception; Markets; Power and Influence; Consumer Products Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Auto Industry; Fashion Industry; Food and Beverage Industry
- December 2009 (Revised October 2015)
- Case
Diamond Foods
By: David E. Bell and Mary Louise Shelman
CEO Michael Mendes has transformed a grower-owned cooperative into a publicly traded top marketer of snack foods. Diamond's organization, culture, product development process, advertising and promotion strategy, and specifically its marketing department have been built... View Details
- November 2009
- Article
Organizational Design and Control across Multiple Markets: The Case of Franchising in the Convenience Store Industry
Many companies operate units that are dispersed across different types of markets, and thus serve significantly diverging customer bases. Such market-type dispersion is likely to compromise the headquarter's ability to control its local managers' behavior and satisfy... View Details
- August 26, 2009
- Comment
Where Cash for Clunkers Ran Off the Road
By: John A. Quelch
Today, let us celebrate the end of an unjustifiable drain on the U.S. taxpayer: the Cash for Clunkers (C4C) program.
True, C4C greatly boosted the number of consumers visiting car dealers. Doubtless, some new cars were sold to consumers who thought they... View Details
True, C4C greatly boosted the number of consumers visiting car dealers. Doubtless, some new cars were sold to consumers who thought they... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised July 2010)
- Case
Jones Lang LaSalle: Reorganizing around the Customer (2005)
By: Ranjay Gulati and Lucia Menzer Marshall
Peter Roberts, CEO of Jones, Lang, LaSalle (JLL) Americas division, has been charged with expanding the company's presence in its core geographic markets while simultaneously growing its corporate account business. Roberts and his task force have narrowed their options... View Details
- 2009
- Chapter
Creating Superior Customer Value in a Connected World
By: Ranjay Gulati
"In the early twenty-first century, customers are more demanding than ever, and difficult economic times make them all the more so. As customers tighten their wallets and increase their demands, firms face greater pressure to provide superior customer value. Reducing... View Details
- April 2009 (Revised July 2010)
- Case
Corporate Solutions at Jones Lang LaSalle (2001)
By: Ranjay Gulati and Lucia Menzer Marshall
Peter Barge, CEO of the newly created Corporate Solutions Group of Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), is executing a restructuring of the U.S. corporate real estate services division that will enable the company to offer its clients integrated solutions. Barge has created an... View Details
- April 2009
- Article
How to Market in a Downturn
By: John A. Quelch and Katherine Jocz
This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. Because no two recessions are exactly alike, marketers find themselves in poorly... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Taking a 'Deep Dive': What Only a Top Leader Can Do
By: Howard H. Yu and Joseph L. Bower
Unlike most historical accounts of strategic change inside large firms, empirical research on strategic management rarely uses the day-to-day behaviors of top executives as the unit of analysis. By examining the resource allocation process closely, we introduce the... View Details
- Article
Households' Willingness to Pay for 'Green' Goods: Evidence from Patagonia's Introduction of Organic Cotton Sportswear
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Michael Crooke, Forest L. Reinhardt and Vishal Vasishth
To shed light on individuals' willingness to pay for "green" goods (i.e., goods that are supposed to have lower adverse environmental impacts either in production or in use), we study data from the introduction by Patagonia, Inc., of organic cotton sportswear in the... View Details
- 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
- 2009
- Working Paper
Dishonest Deed, Clear Conscience: Self-Preservation through Moral Disengagement and Motivated Forgetting
By: Lisa L. Shu, Francesca Gino and Max H. Bazerman
People routinely engage in dishonest acts without feeling guilty about their behavior. When and why does this occur? Across four studies, people justified their dishonest deeds through moral disengagement and exhibited motivated forgetting of information that might... View Details