Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,581)
- Faculty Publications (266)
- January 2019 (Revised February 2024)
- Teaching Note
Hubble Contact Lenses: Data Driven Direct-to-Consumer Marketing
By: Ayelet Israeli
Teaching Note for HBS No. 519-011. As its Series A extension round approaches, the founders of Hubble, a subscription-based, social-media fueled, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of contact lenses, are reflecting on the marketing strategies that have taken them to a... View Details
Keywords: DTC; Direct To Consumer Marketing; Health Care; Mobile; Attribution; Experimentation; Experiments; Churn/retention; Customer Lifetime Value; Internet Marketing; Big Data; Analytics; A/B Testing; CRM; Advertising; Marketing; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Media; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Digital Marketing; Acquisition; Growth and Development Strategy; Customer Focus and Relationships; Consumer Behavior; Social Media; E-commerce
- January 2019
- Case
Understanding the Brand Equity of Nestlé Crunch Bar: A Market Research Case
By: Jill Avery and Gerald Zaltman
In early 2018, Nestlé announced the sale of its U.S. candy-making division and a select collection of 20 of its confectionery brands, including the Nestlé Crunch Bar, to Ferrero SpA for $2.8 billion. Under the terms of the Nestlé acquisition, each of the purchased... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community
By: Jill Avery
Glossier’s proclaimed strategy was “born from content; fueled by community.” The digital-first, direct-to-consumer beauty brand had experienced rapid growth, with sales up 600% in 2017 and a customer portfolio that grew by threefold. But, its founder, Emily Weiss, was... View Details
Keywords: Brands; Brand Management; Brand Communication; Retailing; DTC; Influencer; Startup; Internet Marketing; Big Data; Crowdsourcing; Growth and Development Strategy; Social Media; E-commerce; Internet and the Web; Digital Marketing; Consumer Products Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Retail Industry; United States; North America
- October 2018
- Article
Competing with Complementors: An Empirical Look at Amazon.com
By: Feng Zhu and Qihong Liu
Platform owners sometimes enter complementors' product spaces to compete against them directly. Prior studies have offered two possible explanations for such entries: platform owners may target the most successful complementors so as to appropriate value from their... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Need for Speed: The Impact of Website Performance on Online Retail
By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno
The share of e-commerce sales is rapidly increasing and so are the associated losses generated by website outages and slow websites. We leverage novel retail and website performance data to investigate the impact of website performance on online sales. This question is... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Opportunistic Returns and Dynamic Pricing: Empirical Evidence from Online Retailing in Emerging Markets
By: Chaithanya Bandi, Antonio Moreno, Donald Ngwe and Zhiji Xu
We investigate how dynamic pricing can lead to more product returns in the online retail industry. Using detailed sales data of more than two million transactions from the Indian online retail market, where price promotions are very common, we document two types of... View Details
- Article
Uninformed Consent
By: Leslie K. John
Companies want access to more and more of your personal data—from where you are to what’s in your DNA. Can they unlock its value while respecting consumers’ privacy? View Details
- August 2018 (Revised September 2018)
- Case
Predicting Purchasing Behavior at PriceMart (A)
By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler
This case follows VP of Marketing, Jill Wehunt, and analyst Mark Morse as they tackle a predictive analytics project to increase sales in the Mom & Baby unit of a nationally recognized retailer, PriceMart. Wehunt observed that in the midst of the chaos that surrounded... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised September 2018)
- Supplement
Predicting Purchasing Behavior at PriceMart (B)
By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler
Supplements the (A) case. In this case, Wehunt and Morse are concerned about the logistic regression model overfitting to the training data, so they explore two methods for reducing the sensitivity of the model to the data by regularizing the coefficients of the... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised April 2019)
- Case
Chateau Winery (A): Unsupervised Learning
By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler
This case follows Bill Booth, marketing manager of a regional wine distributor, as he applies unsupervised learning on data about his customers’ purchases to better understand their preferences. Specifically, he uses the K-means clustering technique to identify groups... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised April 2019)
- Supplement
Chateau Winery (B): Supervised Learning
By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler
This case builds directly on “Chateau Winery (A).” In this case, Bill Booth, marketing manager of a regional wine distributor, shifts to supervised learning techniques to try to predict which deals he should offer to customers based on the purchasing behavior of those... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
C3.ai—Driven to Succeed
By: Robert Simons and George Gonzalez
CEO Tom Siebel navigates his artificial intelligence (ai) startup through a series of pivots, market expansions, and even an elephant attack to become a leading platform ad service provider. The case describes his unusual management approach emphasizing employee... View Details
Keywords: Strategy Execution; Performance Measurement; Critical Performance Variables; Strategic Boundaries; Internet Of Things; Artificial Intelligence; Software Development; Big Data; Machine Learning; Business Startups; Management Style; Business Strategy; Performance; Measurement and Metrics; Organizational Culture; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Transformation; Applications and Software; Digital Marketing; Analytics and Data Science; Technology Industry; United States; California
- August 2018 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Hubble Contact Lenses: Data Driven Direct-to-Consumer Marketing
By: Jill Avery and Ayelet Israeli
As its Series A extension round approaches, the founders of Hubble, a subscription-based, social-media fueled, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of contact lenses, are reflecting on the marketing strategies that have taken them to a valuation of $200 million and debating... View Details
Keywords: DTC; Direct To Consumer Marketing; Health Care; Mobile; Attribution; Experimentation; Experiments; Churn/retention; Customer Lifetime Value; Internet Marketing; Big Data; Analytics; A/B Testing; CRM; Advertising; Marketing; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Media; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Digital Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Acquisition; Growth and Development Strategy; Customer Focus and Relationships; Social Media; E-commerce; Analytics and Data Science; Health Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; North America; Europe
- June 2018
- Article
Personal and Social Usage: The Origins of Active Customers and Ways to Keep Them Engaged
By: Clarence Lee, Elie Ofek and Thomas Steenburgh
We study how digital service firms can develop an active customer base, focusing on two questions. First, how does the way that customers use the service postadoption to meet their own needs (personal usage) and to interact with one another (social usage) vary across... View Details
- May 2018 (Revised February 2019)
- Case
The Powers That Be (Internet Edition): Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Julia Kelley and Nathaniel Schwalb
As of early 2018, five U.S. technology companies—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft—were among the largest companies in the world. Similarly, three Chinese technology firms—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, or BAT—had emerged as global players due in part to the... View Details
- May 2018
- Case
The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation's Answer Fund
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Matthew G. Preble
Keywords: Data Analytics; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Relationship Management; Cost vs Benefits; Investment Return; Health Care and Treatment; Innovation Leadership; Intellectual Property; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Dissemination; Leadership; Leading Change; Resource Allocation; Goals and Objectives; Marketing Communications; Performance; Programs; Projects; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Networks; Partners and Partnerships; Research and Development; Genetics; Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Social and Collaborative Networks; Nonprofit Organizations; Strategy; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; Biotechnology Industry; United States
- April 2018
- Article
Consumers Avoid Buying from Firms with Higher CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios
By: Bhavya Mohan, Tobias Schlager, Rohit Deshpandé and Michael I. Norton
We document a novel driver of consumer behavior: pay ratio disclosure. Swiss corporation performance data gathered during a legally mandated pay ratio referendum reveals that salient high pay ratios are associated with decreased firm sales (Pilot Study). An... View Details
Keywords: Pay Ratio; Wage Fairness; Purchase Intention; Customers; Wages; Fairness; Consumer Behavior
- Article
Offline Showrooms in Omni-channel Retail: Demand and Operational Benefits
By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
Omnichannel environments where customers shop online and offline at the same retailer are ubiquitous and are deployed by online-first and traditional retailers alike. We focus on the relatively understudied domain of online-first retailers and the engagement of a key... View Details
- March 2018
- Case
TrustSphere: Building a Market for Relationship Analytics
By: Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden
Manish Goel was the CEO of TrustSphere, a seven-year-old company in the data analytics industry that focused squarely on relationship analytics, a space in which TrustSphere was pioneering a unique technology and solutions in the areas of sales, risk, and people... View Details
- March 2018
- Article
In Pursuit of Enhanced Customer Retention Management: Review, Key Issues, and Future Directions
By: Eva Ascarza, Scott A. Neslin, Oded Netzer, Zachery Anderson, Peter S. Fader, Sunil Gupta, Bruce Hardie, Aurelie Lemmens, Barak Libai, David T. Neal, Foster Provost and Rom Schrift
In today’s turbulent business environment, customer retention presents a significant challenge for many service companies. Academics have generated a large body of research that addresses part of that challenge—with a particular focus on predicting customer churn.... View Details