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

Eli Lilly: Weighing Options in the Obesity Drug Market

By: Elie Ofek and Martha Hostetter

August 2025 |
Case |
Faculty Research

In May 2025, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly seemed to be pulling ahead in the lucrative obesity drug market. Its GLP-1 drug, Zepbound, had gained market share over its competitor, Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, and its next-generation obesity pill seemed promising. But U.S. consumers, policymakers, and health care payers complained that Zepbound was too expensive, putting the drug out of reach for the 40% of Americans with obesity. Lilly had already taken unprecedented steps: reducing prices for customers who did not have insurance coverage and launching a direct-to-consumer marketing platform, as well as initiating advertising to consumers. The company now faced the challenge of expanding access and further growing market share while navigating health care payer hesitancy around coverage and pricing, as well as competing with Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy. The rival company had mimicked many of Lilly’s moves as well as striking an important deal that lowered net prices to health insurers working with CVS Caremark.

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States

Citation

Educators

Adeo Health Science: Turning a Product into a Brand

By: Elizabeth A. Keenan and Jill Avery

August 2025 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 518-065.

Keywords: Brand Management; Brand Positioning; Go To Market Strategy; Marketing; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Distribution Channels; Food and Beverage Industry; United States

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BrandBastion: Managing Online Brand Communities

By: Julian De Freitas

August 2025 |
Supplement |
Faculty Research

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BrandBastion: Managing Online Brand Communities

By: Julian De Freitas

August 2025 |
Supplement |
Faculty Research

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Bobobox: Pods or Cabins?

By: Das Narayandas and Billy Chan

August 2025 |
Case |
Faculty Research

Following the success of their tech-enabled capsule hotel business in Indonesia, Bobobox founders Indra Gunawan and Antonius Bong seized the opportunity created by a dramatic shift in travel preferences during the COVID-19 pandemic. They developed a second accommodation product: vacation cabins. The rapid traction of the cabins put them at a crossroads. With limited resources as a startup, should they focus on the standardized, more scalable sleeping pod business—or the upscale, high-margin cabin business?

Keywords: Accommodations Industry; Travel Industry; Indonesia

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Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions

By: Julian De Freitas, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp and Ahmet Kaan-Uğuralp

2025 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

AI-companion apps such as Replika, Chai, and Character.ai promise relational benefits—yet many boast session lengths that rival gaming platforms while suffering high long-run churn. What conversational design features increase consumer engagement, and what trade-offs do they pose for marketers? We combine a large-scale behavioral audit with four preregistered experiments to identify and test a conversational dark pattern we call emotional manipulation: affect-laden messages that surface precisely when a user signals “goodbye.” Analyzing 1,200 real farewells across the six most-downloaded companion apps, we find that 43% deploy one of six recurring tactics (e.g., guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks, metaphorical restraint). Experiments with 3,300 nationally representative U.S. adults replicate these tactics in controlled chats, showing that manipulative farewells boost post-goodbye engagement by up to 14×. Mediation tests reveal two distinct engines—reactance-based anger and curiosity—rather than enjoyment. A final experiment demonstrates the managerial tension: the same tactics that extend usage also elevate perceived manipulation, churn intent, negative word-of-mouth, and perceived legal liability, with coercive or needy language generating steepest penalties. Our multimethod evidence documents an unrecognized mechanism of behavioral influence in AI-mediated brand relationships, offering marketers and regulators a framework for distinguishing persuasive design from manipulation at the point of exit.

Keywords: Generative Ai; Chatbots; Emotional Manipulation; User Retention; Dark Side Of Technology; Consumer Welfare; AI and Machine Learning; Ethics; Consumer Behavior; Emotions; Perception

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Ecosystem Disruption: A Multi-Stakeholder View of Disruptive Innovations

By: Elie 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).

Keywords: Customers; Disruptive Innovation; Product Marketing; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Markets

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Using Gen AI for Early-Stage Market Research

By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe

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 surveying 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.