Fast Moving Consumer Goods - Publications - Faculty & Research

September 2010
Case

Aaron's: Household Goods for the U.S. Base of the Pyramid

By: Michael Chu and Charles Augustus Smithgall IV

With $2.5 billion system-wide revenues, Aaron's, a major rent-to-own supplier to the U.S. base of the pyramid, continues to grow in the recession, but CEO R.C. Loudermilk, Jr. wonders how long the company can sustain the fast growth rate of its past. Founded in 1955,... View Details

Keywords: Fairness; For-Profit Firms; Renting or Rental; Financial Crisis; Demand and Consumers; Social Enterprise; Income; Goods and Commodities; Competitive Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Consumer Products Industry; United States

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24 Jul 2000
Research & Ideas

Global Brands: Connecting With Consumers Across Boundaries

What's in a name? Plenty if you're a consumer marketer trying to build a brand. "They are road signs that help people find orientation in the jungle of supply", said Hans G. Gueldenberg, CEO of Nestlé Deutschland AG. According... View Details

Keywords: by James E. Aisner

25 Apr 2014
News

Harnessing for-profit strategies for social good

Fran Seegull (MBA 1998) seeks to mobilize the business world to adjust its thinking on socially mindful investing, also known as impact investing, and "use the financial capital markets and for-profit mechanisms to move the dial on the... View Details

19 Jul 2017
Research & Ideas

Why Government 'Nudges' Motivate Good Citizen Behavior

to do, like save for retirement—which are both for the good of society and for their own good. Here’s an example. On the first day of a new job, the paperwork is coming at you fast and furious, including a... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

2019
Book

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

By: Shoshana Zuboff

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Profiling; Consumer Behavior; Forecasting and Prediction; Information Technology; Power and Influence; Ethics; Society; Transformation

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August 2017 (Revised March 2020)
Case

Flex Hungary: Launching Production (A)

By: Willy Shih

This case examines design choices in the construction of flow lines. Flow lines are a popular way of arranging production because they are simple and inherently efficient. Equipment or workstations are arranged according to the sequence of steps in which a product is... View Details

Keywords: Manufacturing; Line-balancing; Flow Line; Conveyor-paced Line; Consumer Goods; Consumer Products; Production Management; Production Planning; Production Scheduling; Operations; Production; Management; Supply Chain; Design; Analysis; Goods and Commodities; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; European Union

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10 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

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

of services. "Some of these are point-of-sale situations where we didn’t traditionally think about tipping 15 percent." “In many establishments, we’re now moving to digital payment systems such as Toast that ask you each time you purchase... View Details

Keywords: by Anna Lamb, Harvard Gazette

07 Jul 2021
Book

Good News for Disgraced Companies: You Can Regain Trust

it,” says Harvard Business School Professor Sandra Sucher. By contrast, she notes, when Pinterest proactively moved to keep anti-vaccination activists from spreading misinformation on the site during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

April 14, 2017
Article

Companies Like United Need to Cultivate Good Judgment, and Free Their Employees to Use It

By: John A. Deighton

United Airlines has pledged to improve its training programs and empower its employees to put customers first in the wake of a video showing a passenger being dragged from a plane. Of all the U.S. air carriers, United should have known the power of social media and... View Details

Keywords: Crisis Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Employees; Training; Air Transportation Industry

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21 Dec 2009
Research & Ideas

Good Banks, Bad Banks, and Government’s Role as Fixer

banks by the federal government, it can divide them into good banks and bad banks. The good banks would return to the normal business of taking deposits and making loans; the bad banks would work out and... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson; Banking; Financial Services

03 Nov 2016
Op-Ed

Forget About Making College Affordable; Make it a Good Investment

The August 2016 cover of Consumer Reports featured a striking quote by a 32-year-old nurse with $152,000 in student loans: “I kind of ruined my life by going to college.” While obviously an extreme case, her plight offered merely the... View Details

Keywords: by Joseph Fuller; Education

06 Dec 2019
Blog Post

Moving to the States with My Daughter to Pursue an MBA and Switch Careers

It was the summer of 2017, and after working at Mars in R&D for eight years, I started to think about the next step for my career. I enjoyed my role as a product innovation manager in the Consumer Packaged View Details

14 May 2019
Research & Ideas

Ethics Bots and Other Ways to Move Your Code of Business Conduct Beyond Puffery

report violations when they observe them, so they are actually violating their ethics code by not reporting violations,” Soltes says. Companies have good reason to try and change that. For starters, firms that have an effective compliance... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

30 Sep 2021
Blog Post

Driving Social Impact Through Consumer Behavior: Nonprofit to Finance to Retail with Nicole Krantz (MBA 2022)

testing a new work environment. “I had worked at two smaller companies and founded a startup, so I thought, ‘What’s the opposite of that in retail?’” Krantz said. When she saw an internship opportunity at Dick’s Sporting Goods posted on... View Details

Keywords: Retail

06 Oct 2023
Book

Yes, You Can Radically Change Your Organization in One Week

The biggest, thorniest organizational problems can be solved in just one week, say Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, coauthors of the new book Move Fast and Fix Things. Armed with decision-making power and the... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

12 Jan 2016
News

Opinion: It’s safe to eat Chipotle burritos — and buy some stock

29 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

The Next Marketing Challenge: Selling to ’Simplifiers’

road half the time, grew in number as the size of the average American household declined. The new economy has made it even easier for consumers to get rid of their stuff. These huge houses had to be filled with more stuff, View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

21 Jun 2021
News

How Traffic Congestion In Chicago Is Backing Things Up In Los Angeles: Pipeline Inventory Is Now A Big Logistics Problem

October 2017 (Revised August 2020)
Case

RB

By: Joshua Margolis, Vincent Dessain and Jerome Lenhardt

As 2016 was approaching its end, Rakesh Kapoor, CEO of RB, one of the world’s major fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies, envisioned the prospect of a major acquisition that would add a line of health-related products that promised growth in the developing... View Details

Keywords: Organization Behavior; Corporate Culture; Mergers ＆ Acquisitions; Growth; Geographic Development; Mergers and Acquisitions; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Growth and Development Strategy; France

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February 2010 (Revised June 2022)
Case

Dollarama Inc.

By: Andre F. Perold

Dollarama is the leading operator of dollar stores in Canada. The firm performed extraordinarily well after a leveraged buyout in 2004 and recently executed a highly successful IPO. The company sources its goods primarily from Asia. It has strong brand recognition and... View Details