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

Don’t Let an AI Failure Harm Your Brand

By: Julian De Freitas

July–August 2025 |
Article |
Harvard Business Review

How companies market their AI systems affects the repercussions they face when their products fail. Marketers must promote their AI products with potential failure in mind. To do that, they must first understand consumers’ unique attitudes toward AI. Marketers who avoid the five pitfalls of promoting AI—people tend to blame AI first, view one AI failure as contaminating other AIs, place more blame on companies that overstate AI capabilities, judge humanized AI more harshly, and become outraged by programmed preferences—will limit the damage caused by AI failures.

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Brands and Branding; Product Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Attitudes

Citation

Find at Harvard

Full-Funnel Advertising on TikTok: An Experiment (Solution)

By: Jeremy Yang and Ayelet Israeli

June 2025 |
Exercise |
Faculty Research

TikTok’s Marketing Science team developed a new type of advertising strategy beyond branding and performance advertising, called full-funnel advertising. Branding ads focused on brand building at the top of the funnel by generating consumer awareness, while performance ads focused on driving sales at the bottom of the funnel. The goal of full-funnel advertising is to integrate both branding and performance objectives and holistically drive business metrics along each stage of the marketing funnel. As they developed this strategy, the team needed to investigate if it fulfilled these goals. TikTok Marketing Science ran a simulated experiment to test the efficacy of the full-funnel advertising strategy. This exercise allows students to analyze the advertising experiment.

Citation

Full-Funnel Advertising on TikTok: An Experiment

By: Jeremy Yang and Ayelet Israeli

June 2025 |
Supplement |
Faculty Research

Citation

Full-Funnel Advertising on TikTok: An Experiment

By: Jeremy Yang and Ayelet Israeli

June 2025 |
Exercise |
Faculty Research

Citation

Full-funnel Advertising on TikTok

By: Jeremy Yang, Ayelet Israeli and Alexis Lefort

June 2025 |
Case |
Faculty Research

In 2025 TikTok is working to grow its brand and performance advertising business, along with a new integrated full-funnel solution. As an emerging media platform with unique ad formats and user behavior in a privacy-first environment, TikTok faces both significant opportunities and challenges in scaling its advertising business. The Marketing Science Organization is exploring how to harness TikTok’s creative assets, targeting strategies, and measurement capabilities to deliver better outcomes and reliable metrics to advertisers while accelerating TikTok's overall ad growth.

Citation

Educators

AI and Brand Management: Promises and Perils

By: Julian De Freitas and Elie Ofek

June 2025 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

Teaching Note for HBS Background Note No. 525-021.

Citation

Purchase

TagHive: Edtech Pricing and Distributor Decisions

By: Isamar Troncoso, Frank V. Cespedes and Stacy Straaberg

June 2025 |
Case |
Faculty Research

Education technology (edtech) company TagHive, founded in 2017, used a direct sales team and third-party distributors to sell its Class Saathi hardware and software solution to 300 clients, mainly primary and secondary schools in India. The product aimed to improve student engagement and performance, reduce the time it took teachers to develop and grade learning assessments, enable administrators to better track data, and provide parents more insight into their children’s learning. Founder and CEO Pankaj Agarwal initially priced Class Saathi using a one-time fee, or perpetual licensing, model. However, in 2023, the company began piloting a recurring subscription fee model to ensure steadier revenue. To support the new pricing structure, TagHive enhanced its software with artificial intelligence and expanded its customer support team and their responsibilities to subscription fee customers. By December 2024, TagHive was cash flow positive and planning to scale. Pankaj and his leadership team were considering whether to extend the pilot to all customers and what the effects on other parts of the organization might be. For example, the pilot had prompted TagHive to increase the capacity and responsibilities of its customer support team. If all clients were under the subscription fee model, could the company afford to continue expanding the team or should it rely on its distributors to provide post-sale customer support? Distributors were responsible for half of sales, but outsourcing customer engagement and support could put customer satisfaction and TagHive’s reputation at risk.

Citation

Educators

Balancing Digital Safety and Innovation

By: Tomomichi Amano and Tomomi Tanaka

May–June 2025 |
Article |
Harvard Business Review

Designers of consumer-facing digital products have tended to focus on novelty and speed (“move fast and break things”). They’ve spent more effort on innovating than on anticipating how customers—and bad actors—might engage with products. But as digital products become a primary way in which consumers connect with others, pay for things, and store private information, that view needs to change. The authors contend that companies must embed safeguards into the core of their digital products—starting during the earliest parts of the design process. They must also establish a road map for continued improvement and a dialogue with customers. The safety-by-design model can facilitate innovation rather than constrain it by providing a principled approach to product development.

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Cybersecurity; Demand and Consumers; Safety