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.

More Information
- 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...

More Information
- Award
Outstanding Case Teacher

By: Anita Elberse

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

More Information
- 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

Ecosystem Disruption: A Multi-Stakeholder View of Disruptive Innovations

By: E. Ofek, Michael Haenlein, Eitan Muller and Roman Welden

July 2025 |
Background Note |
Faculty Research

The purpose of this note is to offer a more expansive view of how innovations disrupt markets than has been portrayed thus far in the extant literature by taking an ecosystem perspective. This broader outlook allows examining not only the product strategies of the firms in the focal industry and their mapping to specific customer segments, as in classic treatments of disruption, but to also evaluate the implications for and role of multiple relevant stakeholders. These stakeholders include: Consumers, producers in the focal industry, industry suppliers, industry retailers/channel members, and producers in adjacent sectors. The framework also enables developing a more nuanced thesis of how innovations affect the customer experience and to calibrate the extent of an innovation’s disruptiveness (using a 5-item scale).

Citation

Educators

Using Gen AI for Early-Stage Market Research

By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe

July 18, 2025 |
Article |
Harvard Business Review (website)

Generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), offers a promising new tool for early-stage market research by simulating customer responses to product concepts. This can allow companies to draw conclusions similar to those they’d obtain by survey customers or conducting focus groups, but with much less time and expense. Although LLMs can provide cost-effective and rapid insights, they still require fine-tuning with proprietary data to produce accurate preference estimates. And despite their potential, LLMs should augment rather than replace human research, because they struggle with nuanced customer segmentation and dynamic market conditions.

Keywords: Large Language Models; Large Language Model; Generative Ai; Artificial Intelligence; Market Research; Research; Marketing; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Customers; Consumer Behavior; Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry

Citation

Purchase

In Privacy We Trust: The Effect of Privacy Regulations on Data Sharing Behavior

By: Ozge Demirci, Ayelet Israeli and Eva Ascarza

2025 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

This paper studies the impact of privacy policies on consumer data-sharing behavior, focusing on policy changes in California and Virginia that took effect in 2023. Using data from a leading customer engagement app in the United States, where users upload shopping receipts in exchange for rewards, we find that privacy regulations led to a significant increase in both the volume and scope of receipt uploads, with the largest increases among users who were initially less inclined to share information. To investigate whether these policy changes had a broader impact beyond the platform, we analyze the nationally representative Consumer Expenditure Survey metadata, which details respondent interactions during the survey interviews. We find that respondents in treated states became more willing to share spending information after the policy. We further show that states where the new regulation was implemented experienced heightened privacy awareness, evidenced by an increase in privacy-related Google search activity and a decline in expressed privacy concerns during expenditure survey interviews. Together, these findings suggest that privacy regulations may encourage greater consumer participation by improving transparency and trust around data-sharing practices.

Keywords: Privacy; Privacy Regulation; Data Sharing; Digital Platforms; Policy; Surveys; Behavior; Public Opinion; California; Virginia

Citation

Read Now

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

Reputation Burning: Analyzing the Impact of Brand Sponsorship on Social Influencers

By: Mengjie Cheng and Shunyuan Zhang

July 2025 |
Article |
Management Science

The growth of the influencer marketing industry warrants an empirical examination of the effect of posting sponsored videos on influencers' reputations. We collected a novel dataset of user-generated YouTube videos created by prominent English-speaking influencers in the beauty and style category. We extracted a rich set of theory-driven video features and used DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux reweighting to construct comparable treatment and control groups matched at the influencer-video level. The empirical analysis of the matched sample revealed a reputation-burning effect; that is, posting a sponsored video, compared with posting an equivalent organic video, cost the influencers 0.19% of their reputation (operationalized as the number of subscribers). The reputation-burning effect was stronger among the influencers with larger audiences. An analysis of likes, comments, and comment texts revealed a larger gap in audience response between sponsored and organic videos among the influencers with larger (vs. smaller) audiences. The reputation-burning effect was mitigated when a high fit existed between the sponsored content and the influencer's “usual” content and when the promoted brand was less well known. Our study empirically tested the assumption of several theoretical works. Moreover, it contributes to the literature on influencer marketing and celebrity endorsements, and provides managerial implications for influencers, brands, and social media platforms.

Keywords: Reputation; Mathematical Methods; Marketing Reference Programs; Social Media; Brands and Branding

Citation

Find at Harvard

Purchase

Kevin Love and the Kevin Love Fund: Inspiring People to Live Their Healthiest Lives

By: Anita Elberse and Riyanka Ganguly

June 2025 |
Case |
Faculty Research

In March 2025, professional basketball player Kevin Love learned the latest numbers for what was to date the most eye-catching initiative of his foundation, the Kevin Love Fund: a mental health campaign revolving around a short, animated film—The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story—in which the central character, a young Spider-Man, experiences a panic attack. The initiative was a partnership between the Kevin Love Fund and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Love was all too familiar with mental health challenges—he famously suffered a panic attack during a nationally televised basketball game in November 2017. That experience led him to write an open letter, which triggered an outpouring of support and caused other celebrities and fans alike to share their own fears and struggles. It prompted Love to dedicate his foundation to encouraging conversations about mental health and inspiring people to live their healthiest lives. Did Love have the right approach to reducing the stigma around mental health with the Kevin Love Fund in general, and with The Spider Within campaign in particular? And how could he and his team best build on that work in search of even greater reach and impact?

Keywords: Entertainment; Media; Sports; Health ＆ Wellness; Campaigns; Partnerships

Citation

Educators

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