Publications

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March 2022
Article

When Less Is More: Consumers Prefer Brands that Donate More in Relative versus Absolute Terms

By: Elizabeth A. Keenan, Anne V. Wilson and Leslie K. John

When trying to make a good impression on consumers through charitable giving, is it better for brands to maximize the overall dollars they donate or how much they give in relative terms; for example, the proportion of profits? Across five studies we show that consumers... View Details

Keywords: Cause-related Marketing; Charitable Donations; Generosity; Altruism; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior

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Fall 2024
Article

The Problem of Good Conduct Among Financial Advisers

By: Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru

Households in the United States often rely on financial advisers for investment and savings decisions, yet there is a widespread perception that many advisers are dishonest. This distrust is not unwarranted: approximately one in fifteen advisers has a history of... View Details

Keywords: Personal Finance; Behavioral Finance; Trust; Financial Services Industry

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February 2018 (Revised April 2018)
Case

Yunnan Baiyao: Transforming a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise

By: Michael Chu, William C. Kirby, Nancy Hua Dai and Yuanzhuo Wang

This case tells the story of how Wang Minghui, Chairman of Yunnan Baiyao Group since 1999, transformed a single-product traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) state-owned enterprise (SOE) into a major diversified consumer health player in China's highly competitive... View Details

Keywords: State-owned Enterprise (SOE); Traditional Chinese Medicine; Yunnan; Yunnan Baiyao; Consumer Health; Enterprise Transformation; Transformation; Health; Business History; State Ownership; Private Ownership; Business Strategy; Commercialization; Competition; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; China

10 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

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

percent or less for bad service. That was the expectation up until COVID.” However, “post-COVID,” as businesses came back from pandemic-induced lockdowns, consumer behavior shifted. “Consumers started to realize the value of waitstaff... View Details

Keywords: by Anna Lamb, Harvard Gazette

11 Jun 2018
Blog Post

Reimagining Fashion For The Good Of All

Zalando is a fairly unknown brand in the U.S., but the leading online fashion platform in Europe. Growing at a yearly rate of +20%, it was founded 10 years ago and it currently has more than 15,000 employees and is present in 15 different markets. After having... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Products / Retail

25 Jan 2017
HBS Case

How Should Advertisers Respond to Consumer Demand for Whiter Skin?

think of the role of advertising as providing primes that are psychological in nature as a means of persuasion, you can take something that exists in society—a consumer preference for fair skin—and leverage it for View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Beauty & Cosmetics

Research Summary

Why Do Consumers Contribute to Connected Goods? A Dynamic Game of Competition and Cooperation in Social Networks

Social network platforms and media rely on the voluntary contributions of individual users to stay relevant. Consumers (users) contribute content such as photographs, videos, tweets etc.: these are available to any of their friends or peers, but not... View Details

07 Jul 2021
Book

Good News for Disgraced Companies: You Can Regain Trust

new book The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It, Sucher and her coauthor, HBS research associate Shalene Gupta, highlight those social media examples along with a global list of companies that have either successfully earned the trust of View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

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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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

2022
Working Paper

Many Markets Make Good Neighbors: Multimarket Contact and Deposit Banking

By: John William Hatfield and Jonathan Wallen

We investigate the relationship between the interest rates offered to consumers in a deposit banking market and the contact that banks in that market have with each other in other markets. We show, in a simple theoretical model, that such overlapping relationships... View Details

Keywords: Antitrust; Deposit Banking; Market Power; Multimarket Contact; Banks and Banking; Markets; Competition

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23 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

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

attract desirable customers. "On the face of it, price coherence seems good for consumers because they get a benefit for choosing the intermediary, and they pay no additional fee," says Benjamin G. Edelman,... View Details

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

07 Jan 2002
What Do You Think?

Did Consumer Behavior Tracking Come of Age on September 11?

age and with it comes a price: privacy. If monitoring is a good way to provide security, so be it." Have we become so accustomed, however gradually, to the idea of oversight that surveillance in the name of transparency is a mere... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

May 2016 (Revised May 2017)
Case

Supply Chain Finance at Procter & Gamble

By: Benjamin C. Esty, E. Scott Mayfield and David Lane

In April 2013, Procter & Gamble (P&G), the world’s largest consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, announced that it would extend its payment terms to suppliers by 30 days. At the same time, P&G announced a new supply chain financing (SCF) program giving suppliers the... View Details

07 Apr 2022
Research & Ideas

Giving Back: Consumers Care More About How Companies Donate Than How Much

Companies donate billions of dollars every year, hoping their generosity will not only help important causes, but also attract socially conscious consumers to their brands. What companies might not realize is that people focus less on the... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

July 2020
Case

Kathy Fish at Procter & Gamble: Navigating Industry Disruption by Disrupting from Within

By: Emily Truelove, Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards

When Kathy Fish, Procter & Gamble’s Chief Research, Development & Innovation Officer, and a 40-year company veteran, stepped into her role in 2014, she was concerned that the world’s leading consumer packaged goods company had lost its capability to produce a steady... View Details

Keywords: Female Protagonist; Organizational Change; Organizational Behavior; Culture Change; Digital; Innovation; Lean Startup; Experimentation; Metrics; Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG); Leadership; Leading Change; Change Management; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Disruption; Innovation and Invention; Digital Transformation

July 2009
Article

Bad Riddance or Good Rubbish? Ownership and Not Loss Aversion Causes the Endowment Effect

By: C. K. Morewedge, L. L. Shu, D. T. Gilbert and T. D. Wilson

People typically demand more to relinquish the goods they own than they would be willing to pay to acquire those goods if they didn't already own them (the endowment effect). The standard economic explanation of this phenomenon is that people expect the pain of... View Details

Keywords: Value; Judgments; Consumer Behavior; Attitudes