Customer Focus and Relationships - Publications - Faculty & Research

June 2012
Article

Pricing to Create Shared Value

Many companies are in competition with their customers to extract as much value as possible from every transaction. Pricing is their weapon of choice, and consumers fight back by rooting out and disseminating pricing policies that seem unfair. The problem is that... View Details

Keywords: Pricing; Marketing Strategy; Price; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Relationship Management; Value Creation; Fairness

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25 Jun 2014
Lessons from the Classroom

FIELD Trip: Conquering the Gap Between Knowing and Doing

closely matched how a startup is formed, and two, students quickly realized it didn't solve all of their problems. If you are in a team and somebody is not pulling their weight, are you more likely to call... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Education

11 Jul 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

Deconstructing 'Customer Experience'

customer anxiety on service relationships is neither well understood, nor consistently factored into service design. How Do Incumbents Fare in the Face of Increased Service Competition?When does increased... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail; Service

2020
Book

The Ends Game: How Smart Companies Stop Selling Products and Start Delivering Value

By: Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg

How some firms are rewriting the rules of commerce by pursuing “ends”—actual outcomes—rather than selling “means”—their products and services. View Details

Keywords: Commerce; Business Model; Design; Customer Relationship Management; Strategy

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01 Aug 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, August 1

Brand (in)fidelity: When Flirting with the Competition Strengthens Brand Relationships By: Consiglio, I., D. Kupor, F. Gino, and M.I. Norton Abstract—We document the existence View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

07 Dec 1999
Research & Ideas

Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century

strategic rationale of branding and its importance to competing effectively on the demand side of the economy. In a young market, he realized, consumers had to be able to identify a particular product's source, functional attributes,... View Details

Keywords: by Nancy F. Koehn

13 Aug 2024
Op-Ed

Can AI Save Physicians from Burnout?

unease, and high turnover rates. Now, many health care organizations are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) as a potential solution to physician overwork and burnout. After all, AI offers... View Details

Keywords: by Susanna Gallani, Lidia Moura, and Katie Sonnefeldt; Health

06 Feb 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas: February 6, 2018

it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a subject of historical inquiry? What is its potential across multiple disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a range of geographic and... View Details

17 Oct 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, October 17, 2017

environments differently than those pursuing traditional closed strategies. This chapter considers these strategies together highlighting similarities and differences between platform, open/user innovation, View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Zhongming Jiang

Zhongming Jiang is a first-year Ph.D. student in Marketing (Quantitative) at Harvard Business School. His research focuses on developing methodologies for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that enable personalized interventions, dynamic customer... View Details

Celia Stafford

Celia Stafford is a doctoral student in Health Policy (Management). She received a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Emory University in 2017 and an MPH focused in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2020. She is also... View Details

03 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

Why Fierce Competitors Apple and Amazon Became ’Frenemies’ Over eReaders

terms, both companies would like nothing better than to have customers to themselves, wrapped up in their own seamless media universes: iTunes, iPad, and Apple TV on the one hand; View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Information; Publishing; Technology

April 2025
Case

Salesforce Agentforce: The Limitless Workforce

By: Suraj Srinivasan, Allison Ciechanover and George Gonzalez

In early 2025, Salesforce was a global leader in cloud-based enterprise software, best known for pioneering customer relationship management (CRM) delivered as a service. Over the past two decades, the company had expanded into marketing, customer service, analytics,... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Customer Relationship Management; Price; AI and Machine Learning; Technology Adoption; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Sales; Business Strategy; Ethics; Product Launch; Technology Industry; United States

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23 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

It’s Called ‘Price Coherence,’ and It’s Surprisingly Bad for Consumers

restrictions imposed by the intermediaries, who want consumers to focus less on price differences and more on the benefits of value-added services that they provide, such as distribution, one-stop shopping,... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Air Transportation; Food & Beverage; Entertainment & Recreation

Using Gen AI for Early-Stage Market Research - Harvard Business Review

Generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), offers a promising new tool for early-stage market research by simulating customer responses to product concepts. This can allow companies to draw conclusions... View Details

18 Jul 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, July 18, 2017

the network of relationships between brokers and institutional investors shapes the information diffusion in the stock market. We exploit trade-level data to show that central brokers gather information by... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 1994
Case

Campbell Soup Company: A Leader in Continuous Replenishment Innovations

Campbell Soup, like most food manufacturers, faced grocery chain and wholesale demand for its goods driven by Campbell's own promotional pricing structure rather than retail consumer demand. Former policies to encourage overstock created huge swings in production and... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Supply Chain Management; Logistics

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01 Dec 1999
News

Covering the Issues

rented 75 PCs for participants in the Program for Management Development. The Bulletin noted that the new technology enabled "a quick consensus on the numbers and allow[ed] a focus on the real issues of a... View Details

Keywords: Susan Young, Deborah Blagg, and Garry Emmons

16 Jan 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, January 16, 2018

But when properly managed, culture can help them achieve change and build organizations that will thrive in even the most trying times. In "The Leader's Guide to Corporate Culture," the authors describe eight distinct culture... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

November 1999 (Revised February 2000)
Case

Granny's Goodies, Inc.

By: Das Narayandas and Katherine B. Korman

The young entrepreneurs of Granny's Goodies, Inc., a corporate gift package specialist, face the challenge of finding ways to create consistent revenue streams and reduce sales costs. Outside of a few long-term contracts, the two founders have had to work very hard for... View Details