Marketing

- Featured Publication
Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh and Kannan Srinivasan

Nominated for the 2022 John D. C. Little Award.

They study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Their empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment.
- Featured Publication
Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh and Kannan Srinivasan

Nominated for the 2022 John D. C. Little Award.

They study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Their empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment.
- Featured Case
Hometown Foods: Changing Price Amid Inflation Case

By: Julian De Freitas, Jeremy Yang, and Das Narayandas

During the early part of the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Hometown Foods, a large seller of flour-based products, thrived as consumers hoarded baked goods and took up baking to pass the time and find comfort. Then, amid growing shortages in commodities, a vaccine arrived, businesses began to re-open, and consumers benefited from federal relief aid. This perfect storm of high demand amid stock shortages generated the highest inflation in 13 years.
- Featured Case
Hometown Foods: Changing Price Amid Inflation Case

By: Julian De Freitas, Jeremy Yang, and Das Narayandas

During the early part of the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Hometown Foods, a large seller of flour-based products, thrived as consumers hoarded baked goods and took up baking to pass the time and find comfort. Then, amid growing shortages in commodities, a vaccine arrived, businesses began to re-open, and consumers benefited from federal relief aid....
- Award
Winner of the 2016 Case Centre Award in the Marketing category for “The New York Times Paywall” (HBS Case 512-077).

By: Sunil Gupta, Vineet Kumar, Bharat Anand, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee

The Case Centre Awards and Competitions recognize worldwide excellence in case writing and teaching, and are considered the case community's annual 'Oscars'. The winners of this category are the Marketing cases that were used in the largest number of organizations across the globe in the preceding calendar year.
- Award
Winner of the 2016 Case Centre Award in the Marketing category for “The New York Times Paywall” (HBS Case 512-077).

By: Sunil Gupta, Vineet Kumar, Bharat Anand, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee

The Case Centre Awards and Competitions recognize worldwide excellence in case writing and teaching, and are considered the case community's annual 'Oscars'. The winners of this category are the Marketing cases that were used in the largest number of organizations across the globe in the preceding calendar year.
- Featured Case
FARM Rio: Bringing a Brazilian Fashion Brand to the World

By: Isamar Troncoso and Jill Avery

FARM Rio, a twenty-six year old Brazilian fashion brand had recently put down roots in the U.S. The brand, known for its bold, colorful, nature-inspired tropical prints, was testing the waters in Europe to assess if and how the brand should further expand globally. Balancing two different geographic markets was proving to be more challenging than expected and the team had needed to make changes to the brand's name and positioning, price points, and its product quality, styles, and fits to accommodate the needs of retailers and consumers in the U.S.

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- Featured Case
FARM Rio: Bringing a Brazilian Fashion Brand to the World

By: Isamar Troncoso and Jill Avery

FARM Rio, a twenty-six year old Brazilian fashion brand had recently put down roots in the U.S. The brand, known for its bold, colorful, nature-inspired tropical prints, was testing the waters in Europe to assess if and how the brand should further expand globally. Balancing two different geographic markets was proving to be more challenging than...

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- Award
Outstanding Case Teacher

By: Anita Elberse

This world-wide Case Centre competition recognizes an excellent practitioner in the case classroom.

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- Award
Outstanding Case Teacher

By: Anita Elberse

This world-wide Case Centre competition recognizes an excellent practitioner in the case classroom.

More Information

About the Unit

Marketing is critical for organic growth of a business and its central role is in creating, communicating, capturing and sustaining value for an organization. Marketing helps a firm in creating value by better understanding the needs of its customers and providing them with innovative products and services. This value is communicated through a variety of channels as well as through the firm's branding strategy. Effective management of customers and pricing allows the firm to capture part of the value it has created. Finally, by building an effective customer-centric organization a firm attempts to sustain value over time.

Our faculty addresses a broad array of topics in all of these areas. Our work attempts to get a better understanding of how consumers use information and make choices and how these choices affect the firm's strategy for new product development, customer relationship management, branding and other marketing efforts. We examine issues related to branding, business marketing, global marketing, distribution channels, pricing, direct and interactive marketing, sales management and return on marketing investment. Some of our faculty specializes in specific industries such as retailing, agribusiness, social enterprise, media, arts and entertainment.

There are several new developments in marketing that offer opportunities for us to make important contributions in the future. The current economic crisis is changing consumers' current and future purchase and consumption patterns. Search engines have changed the way consumers obtain information and make decisions and they are also dramatically changing the advertising industry. Social networks and user generated content have opened a new way for consumers to engage with each other as well as with brands and companies. There are significant changes in the attitudes of consumers and companies about social issues. Consumer preferences and choice of products are increasingly influenced by social factors. Companies are recognizing that there is a large market at the "bottom of the pyramid" and marketing to these consumers may require a new framework. These and related developments provide great opportunities for the marketing faculty to make a significant impact in the future.

Recent Publications

AI in Disguise—How AI-generated Ads' Visual Cues Shape Consumer Perception and Performance

By: Yannick Exner, Jochen Hartmann, Oded Netzer and Shunyuan Zhang

Working Paper |
Faculty Research

Generative AI’s recent advancements in creating content have offered vast potential to transform the advertising industry. This research investigates the impact of generative AI-enabled visual ad creation on real-world advertising effectiveness. For this purpose, we collaborate with a display ad platform and leverage a quasi-experimental setting that includes over two million ad-day observations by over seven thousand advertisers across nearly 50 product categories, encompassing more than 16 billion ad impressions and 116 million clicks. We find that display ads in which the image was AI-generated outperform ads with human-generated images in terms of click-through rates, but only if these AI-generated images do not 'look like AI.' We identify key visual features influencing consumers’ perception of an ad looking like it was generated by AI. While AI generates more aesthetic images with larger faces, consumers associate these features with human-made ads. In contrast, in line with consumers’ expectations, intense color saturation in ads signals AI generation to consumers. Our findings have important implications for advertising platforms that offer AI-powered content creation tools and for advertisers adopting these technologies.

Keywords: Digital Marketing; AI and Machine Learning; Advertising; Consumer Behavior; Advertising Industry

Citation

Patch Technology: Making It Easy to Do the Right Thing

By: Tomomichi Amano

January 2025 |
Teaching Plan |
Faculty Research

Teaching Plan for HBS Case No. 522-037.

Citation

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Humor as a Window into Generative AI Bias

By: Roger Samure, Julian De Freitas and Stefano Puntoni

2025 |
Article |
Scientific Reports

A preregistered audit of 600 images by generative AI across 150 different prompts explores the link between humor and discrimination in consumer-facing AI solutions. When ChatGPT updates images to make them “funnier”, the prevalence of stereotyped groups changes. While stereotyped groups for politically sensitive traits (i.e., race and gender) are less likely to be represented after making an image funnier, stereotyped groups for less politically sensitive traits (i.e., older, visually impaired, and people with high body weight groups) are more likely to be represented.

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Demographics; Prejudice and Bias

Citation

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Real Madrid Club de Fútbol

By: Anita Elberse, Juan Pasquín and Íñigo Pasquín

January 2025 |
Case |
Faculty Research

On June 1, 2024, Spanish soccer club Real Madrid captures its fifteenth Champions League title—more than double the tally of the nearest competitor. Under Florentino Pérez’s leadership, the club has now won six of the last eleven UEFA Champions League titles, and has found success off the field, with its revenues outpacing those of any other soccer club in the world. However, significant challenges are looming, prompting Real Madrid to shift its player acquisition strategy by betting more on relatively young players, to grow its revenues through a 1-billion renovation of Real Madrid’s home stadium, and to push for structural change—advocating for a model in which clubs have greater control over how European competitions are run, media rights are managed, and revenues are distributed. Is Real Madrid well positioned to maintain its competitive position on and off the field?

Keywords: Sports; Soccer; Football; Entertainment; Media; Talent Management; Superstars; Marketing; Strategy; General Management

Citation

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Why People Resist Embracing AI

By: Julian De Freitas

January–February 2025 |
Article |
Harvard Business Review

The success of AI depends not only on its capabilities, which are becoming more advanced each day, but on people’s willingness to harness them. Unfortunately, many people view AI negatively, fearing it will cause job losses, increase the likelihood that their personal data will be misused, and even attack humanity someday. Behind this resistance are perceptions that AI is too opaque, emotionless, rigid, and independent and that interacting with humans is preferable. This article explores each one of those psychological barriers to adoption and describes interventions managers can undertake to counter them and make employees more comfortable with using AI tools.

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Technology Adoption; Perception

Citation

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Assessing the Value of Unifying and De-duplicating Customer Data

By: Elie Ofek and Hema Yoganarasimhan

December 2024 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 525-023.

Citation

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WayCool: Addressing Food Loss

By: Rajiv Lal and Kairavi Dey

December 2024 |
Case |
Faculty Research

Headquartered in Chennai, India, WayCool started by focusing on solving the growing challenge of food losses and low farmer incomes. Dasari and Jayaraman, surprised at the amount of fruits and vegetables lost in the agricultural supply chain, set up the company with the goal of reducing food losses and improving farmer incomes. WayCool started with B2C retail, selling fruits and vegetables from food trucks, later expanding to grocery stores under the Sunnybee brand. It then pivoted to a B2B model where it supplied fresh produce to restaurants, hotels, and canteens, allowing it to scale the amount of fresh produce it purchased from the local markets. Soon, WayCool began supplying millions of informal ‘kirana’ shops or mom-and-pop stores, which allowed for greater business expansion. Jayaraman and Dasari were proud of the supply chain the team had created to minimize food losses. Even as the collection center worked efficiently and smoothly, swiftly meeting 98% of demand, the question loomed large: Was WayCool doing enough to solve the food loss problem in perishables? What would it take to minimize losses at a larger scale?

Keywords: Agribusiness; Entrepreneurship; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Asia; India; Bangalore

Citation

Educators

AC Milan

By: Anita Elberse

December 2024 |
Case |
Faculty Research

In April 2024, Giorgio Furlani is nearing the end of his first full season as chief executive officer of Italian soccer club AC Milan. A Harvard Business School Class of 2007 graduate with a finance background, Furlani was appointed by RedBird Capital Partners’ founder and managing partner Gerry Cardinale, a few months after the investment company acquired AC Milan for 1.2 billion. RedBird has big plans for AC Milan, which was traditionally one of Europe’s soccer powerhouses but has largely failed to keep up with its European rivals in the last decade. Working closely with Cardinale, Furlani now will be spearheading RedBird’s plans for AC Milan. Does RedBird have the right strategy to bring AC Milan back to its glory days? How can the club benefit from RedBird’s broader portfolio in sports, media and entertainment? And how can Furlani, in his first management role, best lead the club and manage the relationship with RedBird?