Publications

15 Mar 2019
Blog Post

PART 3: Military Transition and the JD/MBA - Getting on the JD/MBA Path

think beyond classes and activities. The faculty at both schools and at the wider university is a remarkable group of accomplished people who want to help you and can mentor... View Details

January 2022
Case

Bee-ing Better at Bombas

By: Elizabeth A. Keenan, Youngme Moon and John Masko

David Heath and Randy Goldberg founded Bombas in 2013 to serve two missions: to deliver the “best socks in the history of feet,” and to donate socks (the most requested item in homeless shelters) to Americans experiencing homelessness. Eight years later, Bombas had... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Digital Marketing; Distribution; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Quality; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Human Needs; Poverty; Growth and Development Strategy; Apparel and Accessories Industry; New York (city, NY)

July 2005 (Revised April 2006)
Case

Carnival Cruise Lines

By: Lynda M. Applegate, Robert Kwortnik and Gabriele Piccoli

Highlights the potential value of customer data and the choices and challenges the firm faces when attempting to capture this value. Carnival collects a significant amount of individual-level behavioral and demographic customer data. Senior management must now decide... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Demographics; Customer Relationship Management; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Performance Improvement; Business Strategy; Travel Industry; Tourism Industry

April 8, 2024
Article

Loyalty Programs May Limit Competition, and They Could Be Pushing Prices up for Everyone

By: Alexandru Nichifor and Scott Duke Kominers

Keywords: Customer Focus and Relationships; Competitive Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Brands and Branding

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March–April 2020
Article

Avoid the Pitfalls of A/B Testing

By: Iavor I. Bojinov, Guillaume Sait-Jacques and Martin Tingley

Online experiments measuring whether “A,” usually the current approach, is inferior to “B,” a proposed improvement, have become integral to the product-development cycle, especially at digital enterprises. But often firms make serious mistakes in conducting these... View Details

Keywords: A/B Testing; Experiment Design; Social Networks; Product Development; Performance Improvement; Measurement and Metrics; Social Media

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December 2009 (Revised September 2014)
Case

TD Canada Trust

By: Dennis Campbell and Brent Kazan

The case illustrates the role of performance measurement and analytics in translating TD-Canada Trust's service model of "comfortable banking" into operational terms. In 2000, in a banking market where consumers and regulators were typically hostile to mergers and... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Satisfaction; Commercial Banking; Profit; Balanced Scorecard; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Banking Industry; Canada

June 2014 (Revised March 2016)
Case

Relating to Peapod

By: Susan Fournier and Jill Avery

Explores the relationships formed between consumers and the Peapod consumer-direct grocery delivery service, as revealed through an ethnographic study of Boston-area Peapod shoppers conducted between the Summer of 1997 and the Fall of 1999. Three representative case... View Details

Keywords: Brands and Branding; Customer Relationship Management; Marketing Strategy; Service Industry; Boston

17 Jan 2024
HBS Case

Psychological Pricing Tactics to Fight the Inflation Blues

have to be careful about how and what they charge.” Amid fierce online competition among companies that know consumers can compare prices with a few clicks, the ultimate goal of psychological pricing is to help View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald; Consumer Products; Retail

October 2000 (Revised March 2001)
Case

BizRate.com

By: Youngme E. Moon

BizRate is a market research firm that collects point-of-purchase customer feedback data from retailing merchants. It then makes its findings available to consumers in the form of "BizRate star ratings," which are displayed on its website. To date, its primary revenue... View Details

Keywords: Business Education; Marketing Channels; Internet and the Web; Customer Relationship Management; Trust; Business Model; Marketing Strategy; Internet and the Web; Business Divisions; Debates; Retail Industry

Web

IT Strategy: Strengthening Collaboration Between HBS IT and Faculty | Information Technology

recognized the need for a deeper and more strategic engagement with faculty. HBS IT launched an initiative to bridge this gap, aiming to foster stronger collaboration, streamline technology support processes, View Details

Research Summary

Current working papers

Organizational restructuring: the influence of formal and informal structure on tie formation. This paper considers how changes in formal structure and a key element of informal structure – the embeddedness of employee... View Details

July 2016 (Revised January 2019)
Case

Cyber Breach at Target

By: Suraj Srinivasan, Lynn S. Paine and Neeraj Goyal

In November and December of 2013, Target Corporation suffered one of the largest cyber breaches to date. The breach that occurred during the busy holiday shopping season resulted in personal and credit card information of approximately 110 million Target customers... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Credit Cards; Customer Relationship Management; Internet and the Web; Governing and Advisory Boards; Crisis Management; Retail Industry

16 Jan 2019
Research & Ideas

What Football Firings Teach Managers About Staying Relevant

to their dismissal. A link between tenure and effectiveness We developed a simple model to analyze the relationship between coach tenure and effectiveness using NFL data from... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg, Evan M.S. Hecht, and Abhijit Naik; Sports

2017
Chapter

Marketing Models for the Customer-Centric Firm

By: Eva Ascarza, Peter S. Fader and Bruce G.S. Hardie

A customer-centric firm takes the view that there are three key drivers of (organic) growth and overall profitability: Customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer development (i.e., increasing the value of each existing customer (per unit of time) while they... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Customer Focus and Relationships

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Research Summary

Overview

By: Jill J. Avery

I love brands and have been managing them and studying them for 25 years, as a brand manager and as an academic researcher and teacher. My research program focuses on brand management and customer relationship management and centers on themes relating to the meaning of... View Details

25 Mar 2018
News

When consumer packaged goods start acting like software

May 2005 (Revised April 2010)
Case

GlaxoSmithKline: Reorganizing Drug Discovery (A)

By: Robert S. Huckman and Eli Strick

Describes the reorganization of drug discovery at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) following the formation of GSK from the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham. This reorganization placed nearly 2,000 research scientists into six centers of excellence in drug discovery... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Decision Choices and Conditions; Operations; Organizational Structure; Performance Improvement; Research and Development; Pharmaceutical Industry

02 Sep 2015
What Do You Think?

What's Wrong With Amazon’s Low-Retention HR Strategy?

service for customers and long-term profits to patient investors but disappointment for some people who have gone to work there. (In parlance that my co-authors and I used in... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Web Services; Retail; Apparel & Accessories; Consumer Products; Fashion

2015
Working Paper

Client Service, Compensation, and the Sell-Side Analyst Objective Function: An Empirical Analysis of Relational Incentives in the Investment-Research Industry

By: David A. Maber, Boris Groysberg and Paul M. Healy

This paper investigates how sell-side analysts build and sustain their client networks; the economic gains to successfully managing this challenge; and the metrics through which these incentives are delivered. In a typical semiannual period, the average analyst... View Details

Keywords: Networks; Measurement and Metrics; Operations; Customer Focus and Relationships; Jobs and Positions