Publications

Research Summary

Overview

By: Rohit Deshpande

Customer Centricity Rohit Deshpandé's research program focuses on Customer-Centricity. A stream of projects examines the interaction between corporate and national culture as they influence the development and implementation of global marketing strategies in high... View Details

2016
Article

Academia's Emerging Crisis of Relevance and the Consequent Role of the Engaged Scholar

By: Andrew J. Hoffman

Universities are facing a crisis of relevance. While there are multiple reasons for this to be happening, one that deserves particular attention is the extent to which academic scholars do not see it as their role to engage in public and political discourse. However,... View Details

Keywords: Political Discourse; Public Engagement; Higher Education; Social Media

July 2019 (Revised August 2020)
Case

Peabody Essex Museum: What Next?

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Jeffrey F. Rayport

The case describes the 25-year transformation of Peabody Essex Museum, which was created in 1993 by the merger of two sub-scale predecessor cultural institutions, operating since 1799, in Salem, Massachusetts. Dan Monroe, its founding CEO, began a process of building... View Details

Keywords: Museums; Strategy; Leadership; Transformation; Innovation Leadership; Strategic Planning

Educators

June 2016
Teaching Note

HubSpot: Lower Churn through Greater CHI

By: Jill Avery, Asis Martinez Jerez and Thomas Steenburgh

HubSpot, a web marketing startup selling inbound marketing software to small- and medium-sized businesses, is under pressure from its venture capital partners to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. The B2B SaaS company is in the... View Details

Keywords: CRM; Customer Acquisition; Customer Retention; Churn Management; SaaS Business Models; Customer Lifetime Value; Venture Capital; Startup; Software; Monitoring And Control; Marketing; Customer Relationship Management; Marketing Strategy; Accounting; Technology Industry; United States

2012
Working Paper

School Accountability and Principal Mobility: How No Child Left Behind Affects the Allocation of School Leaders

By: Danielle Li

The move toward increased school accountability may substantially affect the career risks that school leaders face without providing commensurate changes in pay. Since effective school leaders likely have significant scope in choosing where to work, these uncompensated... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Corporate Accountability; Education; North Carolina

February 2023
Article

Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record

By: Zoë Cullen, Will Dobbie and Mitchell Hoffman

State and local policies increasingly restrict employers’ access to criminal records, but without addressing the underlying reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks. Employers may thus still want to ask about a job applicant’s criminal record... View Details

Keywords: Criminal Record; Hiring; Background Checks; Recruitment; Insurance

June 2015
Case

Beacon Group of Hong Kong: Finding Light in the Shadow Education Industry

By: Christopher Marquis, Qi Li and Guy Leung

After more than 25 years of operation, Beacon Group had grown from having 3 small classrooms on the fourth floor of a commercial building, to a network of 21 centers across Hong Kong with over 60,000 students enrolled per year. The key long-term challenge for the... View Details

Keywords: Online Education; Education; Tutoring; Incentives; Hong Kong; Motivation and Incentives; Internet and the Web; Family Business; Education Industry; Hong Kong

Educators

2012
Chapter

China: The Indigenization of Insurance

By: Elisabeth Koll and David Faure

The concept of insurance was introduced to China in the early nineteenth century by Westerners trading in Guangzhou and practised essentially among them. We argue that indigenization of insurance, in particular life insurance, was a slow process that stretched from the... View Details

Keywords: History; Insurance; Insurance Industry; China

02 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

10 Trends to Watch in 2024

The lightning-fast ascent of generative AI isn’t the only sea change on the horizon for businesses in the new year. The global economy is in flux as war, climate change, trade issues, and infrastructure problems demand attention. Many companies continue to struggle to... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

June 23, 2021
Article

Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story

By: Eva Ascarza

When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While... View Details

Keywords: Customer Retention; Churn; Targeting; Market Research; Marketing; Investment Return; Customers; Retention; Research

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07 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

When Glasses Land the Gig: Employers Still Choose Workers Who 'Look the Part'

to aid evaluations. The study examined some of the characteristics that employers look for in photos when assessing whether a candidate is a good fit. And it is an effect, Troncoso, notes, that goes “above and beyond demographics and... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

2021
Working Paper

Supply- and Demand-Side Effects in Performance Appraisals: The Role of Gender and Race

By: Iris Bohnet, Oliver P. Hauser and Ariella Kristal

Performance reviews in firms are common but controversial. Managers’ subjective appraisals of their employees’ performance and employees’ self-evaluations might be affected by demographic characteristics, interact with each other as self-evaluations are typically... View Details

Keywords: Performance Appraisals; Gender; Race; Performance Evaluation

14 Feb 2011
Research & Ideas

Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing

fast-food restaurant chain that wanted to improve its milkshake sales. The company started by segmenting its market both by product (milkshakes) and by demographics (a marketer's profile of a typical milkshake drinker). Next, the... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Service; Consumer Products; Food & Beverage

23 Oct 2024
HBS Seminar

Rosa Ferrer, University of Pompeu Fabra and BSE

January 2024 (Revised August 2024)
Case

Essex County Community Foundation: Pivot to Systems Philanthropy

By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Brian Trelstad and Courtney Han

2023 marked five years of the Essex County Community Foundation (ECCF)’s “systems philanthropy” approach to grantmaking. Located in northeastern Massachusetts, the community foundation served 800,000 residents across 34 cities and towns that varied widely by... View Details

Educators

Article

Social Technology: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Improving Care for Older Adults

By: Arthur Kleinman, Hongtu Chen, Sue E. Levkoff, Ann Forsyth, David E. Bloom, Winnie Yip, Tarun Khanna, Conor J. Walsh, David Perry, Ellen W. Seely, Anne S. Kleinman, Yan Zhang, Yuan Wang, Jun Jing, Tianshu Pan, Ning An, Zhenggang Bai, Jiexiu Wang, Qing Liu and Fawwaz Habbal

Population aging is a defining demographic reality of our era. It is associated with an increase in the societal burden of delivering care to older adults with chronic conditions or frailty. How to integrate global population aging and technology development to help... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Age; Service Delivery; Information Technology; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

Web

Browse All Articles, Research, & Case Studies - HBS Working Knowledge

Politically Divided. That’s Not Surprising. by Richard Calvo, Vincent Pons, and Jesse M. Shapiro Demographics are not destiny in politics. Richard Calvo, Vincent Pons, and Jesse Shapiro explain how their latest research is playing out in... View Details

Winter 2021
Article

Mobile Internet Usage and Usage-based Pricing

By: Jeffrey Prince and Shane Greenstein

Using data on mobile Internet usage of thousands of individuals, we provide some of the first analyses linking mobile usage to key demographics such as income. We find a reverse-U relationship between mobile Internet usage and income—notably different than the... View Details

Keywords: Mobile Internet Usage; Pricing Strategy; Internet and the Web; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Demographics; Income; Price; Strategy

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March 2025
Article

Does Communicating Measurable Diversity Goals Attract or Repel Historically Marginalized Job Applicants? Evidence from the Lab and Field

By: Erika L. Kirgios, Ike Silver and Edward H. Chang

Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment—for example, “We care about diversity” versus “We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority... View Details

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Recruitment; Diversity; Goals and Objectives; Communication Intention and Meaning; Behavior