Consumer Research - Publications - Faculty & Research

08 Jan 2007
What Do You Think?

Neuro Economics: Science or Science Fiction?

associated with findings based on research in need of standards and more fully-developed methods. Joseph Mello points out that "these studies will produce results along two lines. First, there will be conclusions that can impact the... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

17 Jun 2013
Research & Ideas

Advertising Symbiosis: The Key to Viral Videos

YouTube views. By contrast, Nestlé's self-explanatory "From Maine Water Springs to You: The Journey of Poland Springs Water" has barely cracked 500 views. So why did one water commercial sparkle on YouTube, while the other fizzled? The answer may lie at the heart of... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Advertising

26 May 2003
Research & Ideas

What Your Competition is Telling You

Competition keeps you hungry. It forces you to continually find new and more cost-effective solutions to business problems. Although there's nothing new in this insight, recent research suggests some often-overlooked ways in which... View Details

Keywords: by David Stauffer

01 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

How Much Time Should CEOs Devote to Customers?

versus the inside. Marketing expertise depends on customer insights. These insights cannot be gleaned from looking at market research data on a computer screen. Just like politics, all marketing is retail. The customer votes every day at... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

23 Jul 2014
Lessons from the Classroom

Innovation Is Magic. Really

When business executives create innovative products or services, they often look to impress their customers by delivering an experience more meaningful, more delightful, than possibly expected. A true "wow!" moment. And Harvard Business School Professor Stefan Thomke... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Consumer Products

July 2012
Article

Discrete Choice Cannot Generate Demand That Is Additively Separable in Own Price

By: Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that in a unit demand discrete choice framework with at least three goods, demand cannot be additively separable in own price. This result sharpens the analogous result of Jaffe and Weyl (2010) in the case of linear demand and has implications for testing of... View Details

Keywords: Discrete Choice; Unit Demand; Separable Demand; Linear Demand; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Mathematical Methods; Economics

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16 Feb 2004
Research & Ideas

Marketing Wine to the World

"The Changing Structure of the Global Wine Industry," won the Best Paper award at the 2003 European Applied Business Research Conference. Roberto recently shared his thoughts on wine for HBS Working Knowledge in an e-mail... View Details

Keywords: by Manda Salls; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

01 Dec 2014
News

Forecasting ’15

once it is in there, it is my belief that it will give back to the health care system. Patients, doctors, hospitals, government, insurance companies, and researchers will all make better decisions in health care with better information.”... View Details

Keywords: Food Services and Drinking Places; Hospitality; Ambulatory Health Care Services; Health, Social Assistance

12 Sep 2012
Research & Ideas

The Unexpected Link Between Cadavers and Careers

occupations are more likely to bequeath their corpses to medical research than those in male-dominated occupations. “There's a lot of discussion in the field of donation on how to morally increase the supply.” The finding is important... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education; Health

24 Jun 2013
Research & Ideas

Is Your iPhone Turning You Into a Wimp?

monitor? The answer may determine whether you'll play the wimp or the hero in your next office meeting. The body posture inherent in operating everyday gadgets affects not only your back, but your demeanor, reports a new experimental study entitled iPosture: The Size... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

Article

Moment-to-moment Optimal Branding in TV Commercials: Preventing Avoidance by Pulsing

By: Thales S. Teixeira, Michel Wedel and Rik Pieters

We develop a conceptual framework for understanding the impact that branding activity (the audio-visual representation of brands) and consumers' dispersion of attention have on their moment-to-moment avoidance decisions during television advertising. It formalizes this... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Decision Choices and Conditions; Television Entertainment; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Mathematical Methods

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11 Aug 2014
HBS Case

The Business of Behavioral Economics

people's thinking: loss aversion. Research has shown that people are much more averse to losing something they have than they are inclined toward gaining something they don't. So by putting up their own money toward their goal, they try... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Food & Beverage; Health

January 2020
Article

The Long-Run Dynamics of Electricity Demand: Evidence from Municipal Aggregation

By: Tatyana Deryugina, Alexander MacKay and Julian Reif

We study the dynamics of residential electricity demand by exploiting a natural experiment that produced large and long-lasting price changes in over 250 Illinois communities. Using a flexible difference-in-differences matching approach, we estimate that the price... View Details

Keywords: Electricity Demand; Consumption Dynamics; Energy; Policy; Demand and Consumers; Price; Mathematical Methods

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12 Mar 2014
Research & Ideas

Entrepreneurship and Multinationals Drive Globalization

volumes, and in the spirit of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, I sought to pull together my research and conclusions in this book, in the hope of reaching broader audiences. I address three key themes. First, I show that... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

05 Aug 2010
What Do You Think?

What Is Customer Opinion Good For?

and how. It's about understanding consumer needs, not asking them what they want." Several questioned the way some think about the development of products of any type in a rapidly changing business environment. As V. P. Kochikar put it,... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Technology

19 May 2020
Research & Ideas

Why Privacy Protection Notices Turn Off Shoppers

safe.” If companies do provide a notice, however, they must abide by it. For that reason, companies often make them as broad and sweeping as possible—perhaps triggering customers to worry about what the company might do with their data. How privacy statements backfire... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

10 Apr 2006
Research & Ideas

Lessons from the Browser Wars

In a famous example of how first movers can lose their advantage, second-mover Microsoft won the Web browser wars from Netscape and continues to dominate the market today. But that competition was the subject of another "war," this one among View Details

Keywords: by Sara Grant; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

01 Jun 2015
News

The End of Cows?

from a lab rather than a living animal, Alvarez believes consistency—not the myriad environmental or safety benefits of replacing factory farming—may become the main reason consumers adopt it. Once a lab-grown hamburger is perfected,... View Details

Keywords: Jason Feifer; Scientific Research and Development Services; Scientific Research and Development Services; Scientific Research and Development Services

21 Mar 2011
Research & Ideas

Are We Thinking Too Little, or Too Much?

inducing people into believing they can expertly control the ball will affect the way they perceive themselves as business influencers. In fact, Norton spends most of his time thinking about thinking. So it's somewhat ironic that his latest line of View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

June 2005 (Revised March 2006)
Case

E Ink in 2005

By: David B. Yoffie and Barbara Mack

Explores the challenges of commercializing a bleeding-edge technology. After seven years, E Ink has spent more than $100 million to commercialize electronic ink. With business momentum picking up, but resources running out, the case examines the key trade-offs in... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Commercialization; Mathematical Methods; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry

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