Publications
Publications
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(2,514)
- Faculty Publications (745)
- March 2021
- Case
P.F. Chang's
By: Ashish Nanda, Nitin Nohria and Margaret Cross
Excited yet apprehensive after being named CEO of P.F. Chang’s beginning July 1st, 2020, Damola Adamolekun was well aware of the extraordinary challenges facing the firm. The closure of businesses deemed “nonessential” owing to the COVID-19 pandemic had devastated the... View Details
- March 17, 2021
- Other Article
Beyond Pajamas: Sizing Up the Pandemic Shopper
By: Ayelet Israeli, Eva Ascarza and Laura Castrillo
A first look at how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted e-commerce apparel shopping in the US and the UK. Extensive analysis and interactive graphics utilizing millions of transactions.
While the pandemic is still playing out, our preliminary investigations... View Details
While the pandemic is still playing out, our preliminary investigations... View Details
Keywords: Retail; Retail Analytics; Consumer; Pandemic; COVID; COVID-19; Apparel; Ecommerce; Online Shopping; Online Apparel; Online Sales; Returns; CRM; Customer Retention; Customer Experience; Customer Value; Digital; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customers; Health Pandemics; Consumer Behavior; Customer Relationship Management; Internet and the Web; Behavior; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Technology Industry; United States; United Kingdom
- March 2021 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Seeding and Selling Asana
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Amram Migdal
In December 2019, Oliver Jay, Asana’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), was reconsidering his go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Asana was cloud-based work management software that enabled users to break up projects into discrete tasks that could be assigned, scheduled, and... View Details
Keywords: SaaS; Customer Journey; Business Model; Business Organization; Change Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Technology Industry; United States
- March 2021 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
M-KOPA: Empowering Lives
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Wale Lawal and Pippa Tubman Armerding
The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative... View Details
- Article
Selling After the Crisis
Like perishable goods in grocery stores, sales models have a sell-by date. As product standards evolve and new entrants emerge, buyers have more choices and demand more in terms of quality and performance across vendors. Firms that fail to adjust to changing customer... View Details
- February 2021
- Case
Threadless: The Renewal of an Online Community
By: Shane Greenstein, Karim Lakhani and Christian Godwin
Threadless, an online apparel company and artist community which Jake Nickell founded in 2000, continued to maintain its status as a top company in the online apparel industry during its second decade. From 2010 to 2020, Threadless continued to operate its... View Details
Keywords: Business Model; Decision Making; Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Leading Change; Management; Marketing; Product Launch; Operations; Supply Chain; Distribution; Networks; Sales; Strategy; Adaptation; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Technology Industry; North America
- February 2021
- Case
Drizly: Managing Supply and Demand through Disruption
By: Kris Ferreira
It was April 6th, 2020, and the management team at Drizly—an online alcohol marketplace where consumers could browse and purchase alcohol from local liquor retail stores via Drizly’s app for immediate home delivery—were thrilled to see record-breaking sales from the... View Details
- Article
How Real Sales Learning Happens: In the Flow of Work
By: Yuchun Lee, Mark Magnacca and Frank V. Cespedes
Most learning in sales is through peer learning in task-specific contexts, and the effects are cumulative because modeling behavior is a big driver of how salespeople develop. This is very different from the experience in most training seminars, especially if the... View Details
- February 2021
- Case
Yellow Digital Retailers: Providing Solar Electricity to Transform Rural Africa
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Frank V. Cespedes and Michael Norris
In 2020, Mike Heyink and Maya Stewart, co-founders of the Pay-as-you-Go Solar company Yellow were considering how to grow their startup. They had achieved some success in their first market, Malawi, and had recently entered Uganda, where business was slower. What did... View Details
- February 2021
- Article
How Transparency into Internal and External Responsibility Initiatives Influences Consumer Choice
By: Ryan W. Buell and Basak Kalkanci
Amid growing calls for transparency and social and environmental responsibility, companies are employing different strategies to improve consumer perceptions of their brands. Some pursue internal initiatives that reduce their negative social or environmental impacts... View Details
- 2021
- Book
Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing
Selling is changing, but the impact on sales of megatrends like ecommerce, big data, and AI is often misunderstood and not supported by empirical data. Managers who fail to separate fact from hype will make decisions based on bad assumptions and, in a competitive... View Details
- January 2021
- Case
Anodot: Autonomous Business Monitoring
By: Antonio Moreno and Danielle Golan
Autonomous business monitoring platform Anodot leveraged machine learning to provide real-time alerts regarding business anomalies. Anodot’s solution was used in various industries in order to primarily monitor business health, such as revenue and payments, product... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Arçelik: From a Dealer Network to an Omnichannel Experience
By: Ayelet Israeli and Fares Khrais
Arçelik Turkey, the country’s market leader in household appliances, was at an omnichannel crossroads in January 2020. Arçelik was a B2B player utilizing a dealership network with an umbrella of brands and had one of the largest brick-and-mortar store networks in... View Details
Keywords: Digital Marketing; Bricks And Mortar; Franchise Management; Franchising; Dealer Network; Dealers; B2B; B2B2C; Tradition; Culture Change; Cultural Adaptation; Omnichannel; Omnichannel Retail; Omni-channel; Omnichannel Retailing; Sales Channels; Sales Channel Development; Channel Management; Channels Of Distribution; Marketplace; Platforms; Collaboration; Online Channel; Online Data; Online Sales; Online Shopping; Online; Retail; Retailing; Disruption; Transformation; Franchise Ownership; Change Management; Partners and Partnerships; Consumer Behavior; Sales; Internet and the Web; Marketing Strategy; Conflict and Resolution; Conflict Management; Organizational Culture; Distribution Channels; Digital Transformation; Digital Platforms; Electronics Industry; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Turkey
- January 2021
- Exercise
E-Commerce Analytics for CPG Firms (B): Optimizing Assortment for a New Retailer
By: Ayelet Israeli and Fedor (Ted) Lisitsyn
The E-Commerce Analytics group at the traditional CPG firm was in charge of compiling various online sales reports, as well as making data-driven recommendations for sales and marketing tactics. In a series of exercises, students address different data challenges for... View Details
Keywords: Data Analysis; Data Analytics; CPG; Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG); Online Channel; Retail Analytics; Retail; Retailing Industry; Data; Data Sharing; Ecommerce; CRM; Loyalty Management; Assortment Planning; Assortment Optimization; Lifetime Value (LTV); Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Retention; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States
- January 2021
- Article
Sales Hiring Is Hard to Do (Don't Make It Harder)
In the aggregate, hiring in sales is more expensive than many companies’ cap-ex decisions. But it rarely gets the same attention and companies fail to deal with challenges inherent in sales hiring. Unlike many other business functions, there is no easily identified... View Details
- Article
How Long Can a Company Thrive Doing Just One Thing?
By: Andy Wu and Scott Duke Kominers
The news that the chat app Slack was being sold to veteran customer relationship management company Salesforce for $27.7 billion raised a lot of eyebrows. Why sell after a year of explosive growth? The deal, however, epitomizes a question facing so-called best-of-breed... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Migros Turkey: Scaling Online Operations (A)
By: Antonio Moreno and Gamze Yucaoglu
The case opens in November 2019 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey’s oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are contemplating what the best fulfillment format and... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised September 2020)
- Case
Facelift at Olay (A)
By: Sunil Gupta, Rajiv Lal and Olivia Hull
By October 2017, Procter & Gamble’s skincare brand Olay has been struggling with declining sales for several years. The team has tried many remedies, but none has returned the brand to growth. As pressure grows from Olay’s competitors, including hundreds of new... View Details
- August 2020
- Supplement
Luckin Coffee (B): Revelations of Fraud
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
This case describes revelations of fraud at Luckin Coffee, beginning with an anonymous report in January 2020 and continuing with the company’s admission in April 2020 that it had inflated its revenues by 2.2 billion RMB ($310 million), almost half its reported... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside... View Details