Publications

February 2021 (Revised July 2024)
Case

White Claw: Defending Market Share as Competition Encroaches

By: Jill Avery

By the end of 2019, two brands accounted for 84% of hard seltzer sales, a segment that had recently taken the U.S. beer market by storm, growing from $3 million in 2015 to over $2.7 billion by the start of the summer of 2020. White Claw was the dominant market leader... View Details

Keywords: Brand Management; Alcoholic Beverages; Beer/brewing Industry; Brand Positioning; Growth; Competitive Positioning; Consumer Products; Beverage Industry; Value Proposition; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Competition; Product Positioning; Competitive Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States

January–February 2024
Article

Shared Service Delivery Can Increase Client Engagement: A Study of Shared Medical Appointments

By: Ryan W. Buell, Kamalini Ramdas, Nazlı Sönmez, Kavitha Srinivasan and Rengaraj Venkatesh

Problem Definition: Clients and service providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming – perhaps unquestioningly – that devoting individualized attention best improves client outcomes. In contrast, in shared service delivery, clients... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Customer Satisfaction; Outcome or Result; Performance Improvement

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23 Jul 2021
Blog Post

Trends in Consumer Products

show the range of consumer product companies’ experience, I interviewed alumni from three companies to share their stories from the last year of Covid. Their experiences underscore the importance of being an... View Details

November 2021
Article

Ratings, Reviews, and the Marketing of New Products

By: Itay P. Fainmesser, Dominique Olié Lauga and Elie Ofek

We study how user-generated content (UGC) about new products impacts a firm's advertising and pricing decisions and the effect on profits and market dynamics. We construct a two-period model where consumers value quality and are heterogeneous in their taste for the new... View Details

Keywords: Online Reviews; Product Ratings; Social Networks; Word Of Mouth; Pricing; User-generated Content; Advertising; Product Marketing; Price; Consumer Behavior; Product Positioning; Social Media

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April 2013
Case

Sterling Household Products Company

By: William E. Fruhan and Craig Stephenson

Sterling Household Products manufactures and markets a broad line of consumer goods from laundry soap and cosmetics to cleaning, disinfecting, and sanitizing products. The company has many highly regarded brand names and consistently reports impressive sales and... View Details

November 2019
Case

Gillette: Cutting Prices to Regain Share

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

After losing market share to low-priced competitors such as Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club for several years, Gillette decided to fight back by launching new products and increasing advertising. When these efforts failed to stem the losses, Gillette decided to cut the... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Product Positioning; Business Strategy; Competition; Price; Public Equity; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States

27 Mar 2019
News

Sharing the Road

the case of car sharing is the same car gets utilized almost about 75 to 80 percent of the time. “We've invested in two very important aspects of our business. We invest today in telematics and internet of things as a technology to be... View Details

01 Aug 2018
News

Are share buybacks 'plundering company resources'?

August 1991 (Revised February 1992)
Case

Gain Sharing at Star Cablevision Group

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Sarah Ann Greene

Describes Star's experiment with gain sharing over a three-year period. Background on the industry and company's history are provided to establish the context for the shift to pay-for-performance. Describes the three different gain sharing programs, the resulting... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Service Delivery; Performance Productivity; Television Entertainment; Compensation and Benefits; Media and Broadcasting Industry

17 Jan 2023
Cold Call Podcast

Nestlé’s KitKat Diplomacy: Neutrality vs. Shared Value

Keywords: Re: Geoffrey G. Jones; Consumer Products

October 2006 (Revised March 2007)
Case

Production I.G: Challenging the Status Quo

By: Andrei Hagiu, Tarun Khanna, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Masako Egawa and Chisato Toyama

In July 2006, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa wondered how he could further enhance the success and visibility of his animation production company headquartered in Tokyo, Production I.G. For the year ended May 2006, Production I.G. had sales of 5,439 million yen ($47.3 million),... View Details

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Competitive Advantage; Markets; Animation Entertainment; Going Public; Growth and Development Strategy; Motion Pictures and Video Industry; Tokyo

12 PM – 1 PM EDT, 10 Sep 2019
Webinars: Career

How to Succeed in Tech Product Management

YouTube product management director Tom Leung (MBA 2003) will share some of the key traits and skills that set great product managers apart as well as some of the tradeoffs when thinking about product management versus other common tech jobs for MBAs. View Details

November 2019
Supplement

Gillette: Cutting Prices to Regain Share

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

After losing market share to low-priced competitors such as Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club for several years, Gillette decided to fight back by cutting prices on its razors and blades in April 2017. Bonnie Herzog, an equity analyst at Wells Fargo, must assess how the... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Product Positioning; Business Strategy; Competition; Price; Public Equity; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States

14 Dec 2007
Op-Ed

When Your Product Becomes a Commodity

lose market share but improve profitability. 2. Compensate your salesforce on profit margin, not sales revenues. A volume-based salesforce will sign up any customer, regardless of profitability. That's OK early in the View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

04 Mar 2020
News

Healthcare Companies We’re Watching, and Productivity Hacks

19 Dec 2012
Research & Ideas

How to be Extremely Productive

Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours, he shares more performance-enhancing tips on everything from how to sleep better on overnight business flights (window seat, no alcohol, earplugs, and eyeshades) to dealing with... View Details

Keywords: by Deborah Blagg

2020
Working Paper

Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production?

By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani

We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously... View Details

Keywords: Cognitive Similarity; Knowledge Creation; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Dissemination; Relationships

SSRN

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01 Apr 1998
News

Speakers Share Triumphs and Challenges

Malden Mills had once again reached its prefire peak of $400 million in sales, thanks in no small part to the productivity of a grateful work force. "I did what I thought was right," Feurstein declared, "the way my father and grandfather... View Details

Keywords: James E. Aisner

Article

DEA Model with Shared Resources and Efficiency Decomposition

By: Yao Chen, Juan Du, H. David Sherman and Joe Zhu

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has proved to be an excellent approach for measuring performance of decision making units (DMUs) that use multiple inputs to generate multiple outputs. In many real world scenarios, DMUs have a two-stage network process with shared input... View Details

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA); Efficiency; Intermediate Measure; Performance Efficiency