Publications
Publications
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(120,073)
- Faculty Publications (252)
- October 2014 (Revised November 2016)
- Technical Note
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) vs. Customer Lifetime Return on Investment (CLROI)
By: Elie Ofek
This note presents two related measures for assessing the financial value of a customer to the firm. The first is the well-known measure of Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV for short. The second, which has received much less attention, treats the acquisition of a... View Details
- Fall 2014
- Article
How to Win in an Omnichannel World
By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
The omnichannel environment presents new challenges and opportunities for both information and product fulfillment. While all retailers need to effectively and efficiently manage fulfillment and information provision, there are important nuances to how this happens,... View Details
- July–August 2014
- Article
Unlock the Mysteries of Your Customer Relationships
By: Jill Avery, Susan Fournier and John Wittenbraker
Consumers have always had relationships with brands, but sophisticated tools for analyzing customer data are finally allowing marketing organizations to personalize and manage those relationships. With this new power comes a new challenge: people now expect companies... View Details
- 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
- 2014
- Other Teaching and Training Material
Marketing Reading: Brand Positioning
By: Jill Avery and Sunil Gupta
This Reading addresses the principles of brand positioning and demonstrates how companies can strategically craft powerful, resonant, and unique brand positions to help products stand out amidst the cacophony of the marketplace. Strategic brand positioning provides... View Details
Keywords: Brand Positioning; Branding; Consumer Research; Defensive Strategies; Market Positioning; Marketing; Product Differentiation; Product Positioning; Strategic Positioning; Value Proposition; Customer Relationship Management; Organizational Structure; Customer Satisfaction; Brands and Branding
- March 2014
- Article
Choosing the Right Customer
By: Robert Simons
Companies that win in competitive markets identify a primary customer and dedicate maximum resources to meeting that customer's needs. This article will show you how to identify the best primary customer for your business by analyzing perspective, capabilities, and... View Details
- January 2014 (Revised November 2021)
- Case
Filene's Basement: Inside a Fired Customer's Relationship
By: Jill Avery and Susan Fournier
How, in a business climate in which building relationships with customers has dominated both managerial thought and marketing budgets, could Filene's Basement have fired a loyal customer, one who was formally and informally recognized as a best customer? This case... View Details
- September 2013
- Case
SafeBlend Fracturing
By: Benson P. Shapiro, Frank V. Cespedes and Alisa Zalosh
The CEO of SafeBlend Technologies must set a price for the company's environmentally friendly fracturing fluid additive. The firm is negotiating a new contract with its biggest client, Bristol Natural Gas. For the last two years, SafeBlend has been the sole provider of... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Managing Churn to Maximize Profits
By: Aurelie Lemmens and Sunil Gupta
Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability, or their responsiveness to a... View Details
- September 2013 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
Marquee: Reinventing the Business of Nightlife
By: Anita Elberse, Ryan Barlow and Sheldon Wong
In January 2013, nightlife impresarios Jason Strauss and Noah Tepperberg are celebrating the re-opening of their famed New York City–based nightclub Marquee. While most clubs are over within their first one and a half years, Strauss and Tepperberg managed to keep... View Details
- August 2013 (Revised August 2014)
- Case
Catalina In the Digital Age
By: Robert J. Dolan and Uma R. Karmarkar
Catalina in the Digital Age considers how a company with a dominant market position should evolve its established product lines given the rise of novel digital technologies. Since its founding in 1983, Catalina had enjoyed a distinct position in the world of consumer... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Where do the Most Active Customers Originate and How Can Firms Keep Them Engaged?
By: Clarence Lee, E. Ofek and Thomas Steenburgh
In this paper, we study how firms offering Web services can acquire and develop an active customer base. We focus on two basic questions. First, how does the method of customer acquisition affect the way customers use the service to meet their own needs and to interact... View Details
- June 2013
- Case
Olympic Rent-A-Car U.S.: Customer Loyalty Battles
By: John Deighton and James T. Kindley
The marketing and operations managers for Olympic Rent-A-Car meet to decide how to respond to changes in the loyalty rewards program at the market-leading competitor. The competitor's program gives awards based on dollars spent instead of days rented and eliminates... View Details
- May 2013
- Case
Transport Corporation of India (A): The Cross-selling Conundrum
By: V.G. Narayanan and Saloni Chaturvedi
Transport Corporation of India was a logistics company that provided multi-modal transport solutions to its customers. Set up in 1958, TCI had grown from a 'one man, one truck, one office' set-up to a company with revenues of $400 million in half a century. TCI's... View Details
- May 2013
- Supplement
Transport Corporation of India (B): Choosing the Right Candidate
By: V.G. Narayanan and Saloni Chaturvedi
Transport Corporation of India was a logistics company that provided multi-modal transport solutions to its customers. Set up in 1958, TCI had grown from a 'one man, one truck, one office' set-up to a company with revenues of $400 million in half a century. TCI's... View Details
- May 2013
- Supplement
Transport Corporation of India (D): Business Development across Divisions
By: V.G. Narayanan and Saloni Chaturvedi
Transport Corporation of India was a logistics company that provided multi-modal transport solutions to its customers. Set up in 1958, TCI had grown from a 'one man, one truck, one office' set-up to a company with revenues of $400 million in half a century. TCI's... View Details
- January 2013
- Case
Zappos.com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture (MM)
By: Frances X. Frei and Robin J. Ely
On July 17, 2009, Zappos.com, a privately-held online retailer of shoes, clothing, and other soft-line retail categories, learned that Amazon.com, a $19 billion multinational online retailer, had won its Board of Directors' approval to offer to merge the two companies.... View Details
- July 2012 (Revised January 2014)
- Case
HGRM: Bringing Back High Touch Hospitality
By: Lynda M. Applegate and Gabriele Piccoli
The case centers on the dilemma faced by Carlo Fontana, the owner-operator of a small chain of two four-star urban hotels located in Lugano, Switzerland, and the other in Milan, Italy. Having developed an extensive customer service and operations information system,... View Details
- June 2012
- Article
Pricing to Create Shared Value
By: Marco Bertini and John T. Gourville
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
- January – February 2012
- Article
When One Business Model Isn't Enough
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Jorge Tarzijan
Trying to operate two business models at once often causes strategic failure. Yet LAN Airlines, a Chilean carrier, runs three models successfully. Casadesus-Masanell, of Harvard Business School, and Tarziján, of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, explore how... View Details