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

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

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Ideation with Generative AI—In Consumer Research and Beyond

By: Julian De Freitas, G. Nave and Stefano Puntoni

June 2025 |
Article |
Journal of Consumer Research

The use of large language models (LLMs) in consumer research is rapidly evolving, with applications including synthetic data generation, data analysis, and more. However, their role in creative ideation—a cornerstone of consumer research—remains underexplored. Drawing on the human creativity literature, we propose that ideation with LLMs is facilitated by their productivity and semantic breadth, which are psychologically analogous to the dual pathways of persistence and flexibility in human ideation. Further, we distinguish between the utility of LLMs as key ideators versus humans as key ideators, conceptualized through the LLM ideation roles of Designer and Writer and of Interviewer and Actor. While LLMs excel in generating incremental improvements, their potential for groundbreaking innovation could be unlocked by leveraging their ability to prompt human creativity. This paper advances the theoretical and practical understanding of LLMs in ideation for consumer research, offering numerous practical strategies for integrating generative AI into research while emphasizing human-AI collaboration to achieve radical insights.

Keywords: Large Language Model; AI and Machine Learning; Creativity; Innovation Strategy

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Lowe’s: Improving the Total Home Strategy

By: Elie Ofek and Sarah Mehta

May 2025 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

A teaching note to help instructors prepare to teach “Lowe’s: Improving the Total Home Strategy (case no. 524-054).

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EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite

By: Jacob M. Cook

2024 |
Case |
Faculty Research

In EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite, Shivani Bahl is attempting to sell EPCorp's CEO, Debbie Sullivan, on her ideas for not only a new website upgrade but also a more expansive vision on how data and Generative AI can be used to grow the company. Debbie is understandably skeptical given the company's losses to date and the added investments needed to achieve this. In particular, she asks Shivani directly why she should lead this project and why now. Shivani lays out a variety of outcomes for what this technology could do without veering into technical territory and focuses on the benefits ranging from predicting inventory issues to delivering an ecommerce experience that will engender loyalty with emerging customer expectations. This discussion suggests how to convince non-technical leaders of ways data can be leveraged on top of AI. However, a subtle nuance is how EPCorp first needs to think strategically about building its own datasets before it can unlock these insights. In addition, students can debate how and if these data combined with AI can offer a sizable competitive advantage for the company, which must upgrade its digital experience to stay relevant with an evolving customer base that expects an experience on par with Amazon. Key considerations include selling a technical vision to a non-technical audience and ways to hedge bets with AI and data. While this Quick Case can be taught on its own, it is also the third of a three-part series focusing on the considerations companies must face as they navigate the challenges and opportunities of ecommerce: EPCorp: Sell on Amazon or Invest in Our Data? (HBP No. 8272) and EPCorp: What Story Does the Data Tell? (HBP No. 8448).

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; E-commerce; Growth and Development Strategy

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Adobe: GenAI Opportunity or Threat?

By: Sunil Gupta, Rajiv Lal and Allison Ciechanover

April 2025 (Revised April 2025) |
Case |
Faculty Research

In December 2022, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen faced a pivotal strategic decision due to the rapid rise of generative AI image models from OpenAI, Midjourney, and StabilityAI. Adobe, a leader in digital media and marketing software with a 40-year legacy of innovation and successful adaptation recognized GenAI as both an opportunity and a threat to its core business. Many creative professionals, a critical Adobe customer segment, expressed deep concerns over GenAI models trained through data mined from the Internet, raising ethical and trust-related issues. The case explores Narayen and his leadership team’s deliberations: Should Adobe partner with or acquire an existing player, or build its own GenAI model? If Adobe chose to build, how might it responsibly train the model to protect its trusted relationship with enterprise and creative professional customers, while keeping its leadership position in the industry?

Keywords: Technology Industry; San Jose

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Educators

Customer Acquisition and the Cash Flow Trap Supplement

By: E. Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller

April 2025 |
Supplement |
Faculty Research

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Customer Acquisition and the Cash Flow Trap

By: E. Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller

April 2025 |
Background Note |
Faculty Research

Startups as well as existing firms recognize the need to invest in order to acquire customers for their new ventures. And as each customer is expected at some point to have generated sufficient gross margins to cover their CAC, management expects that, soon enough, the overall cash flow will allow them to get out of the red and into the black. However, it turns out that getting into the black often takes much longer than originally expected and, moreover, an aggressive pace of growth can greatly exacerbate the situation - in terms of the cumulative deficit or financial “hole” that the company might find itself in. This note intends to help companies, particularly those with a recurring monetization model (e.g., subscription or SaaS), think through these issues. It further aims to develop a framework for effectively foreseeing the connection between customer acquisition efforts and the cumulative cash flow deficit, aka the “cash flow trap”, as well as highlight several managerial considerations and implications that emanate from this framework.

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Educators

Balancing Engagement and Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment of News Content Using LLMs

By: Mengjie Cheng, Elie Ofek and Hema Yoganarasimhan

2025 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives—making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm’s editorial policy. Using news articles from The New York Times, we first show that more engaging human-written content tends to be more polarizing. Further, naively employing LLMs (with prompts or standard Direct Preference Optimization approaches) to generate more engaging content can also increase polarization. This has an important managerial and policy implication: using LLMs without building in controls for limiting slant can exacerbate news media polarization. We present a constructive solution to this problem based on the Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO) algorithm, a novel approach that integrates Direct Preference Optimization with multi-objective optimization techniques. We build on open-source LLMs and develop a new language model that simultaneously makes content more engaging while maintaining a preferred editorial stance. Our model achieves this by modifying content characteristics strongly associated with polarization but that have a relatively smaller impact on engagement. Our approach and findings apply to other settings where firms seek to use LLMs for content creation to achieve multiple objectives, e.g., advertising and social media.