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New research on marketing from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including advertising, crisis communications, social media, digital marketing techniques and strategy.
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Op-Ed: It’s a Bad Idea to Ban Customers From Recording Videos

by Benjamin G. Edelman

With videos of bad business practices routinely going viral, it might be tempting to prohibit customers from recording their surroundings. But banning cameras is the wrong way to go, says Benjamin Edelman. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

How Cellophane Changed the Way We Shop for Food

by Carmen Nobel

Research by Ai Hisano exposes cellophane's key role in developing self-service merchandising in American grocery stores, and how its manufacturers tried to control the narrative of how women buy food. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Cellophane, the New Visuality, and the Creation of Self-Service Food Retailing

by Ai Hisano

Offering a visual perception of freshness, the expansion of cellophane packaging material dramatically altered how consumers understood food quality. This paper examines the importance of cellophane as “scientific” and “modern” in the early to mid-20th-century United States. It shows how business strategies helped shape, and were shaped by, cultural narratives about cellophane. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Reinventing the American Wine Industry: Marketing Strategies and the Construction of Wine Culture

by Ai Hisano

Since the 1960s, the United States has seen spectacular growth in wine consumption. This paper explores how businesses reinveted the image of wine. This creation of the new market, like other consumer products, had social and cultural consequences. In the US, wine became a status symbol and a renforcer of social and class divisions.

A Luxury Industry Veteran Teaches the Importance of Aesthetics to Budding Business Leaders

by Carmen Nobel

Pauline Brown, a former top executive with French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, now teaches a Harvard Business School course called The Business of Aesthetics, which culminates in a competition called “Aesthetic Idol.” Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Why Comparing Apples to Apples Online Leads To More Fruitful Sales

by Dina Gerdeman

The items displayed next to a product in online marketing displays may determine whether customers buy that product, according to a new study by Uma R. Karmarkar. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Having No Life is the New Aspirational Lifestyle

by Michael Blanding

It used to be that we equated power and prestige with a leisurely, luxurious lifestyle. Today, lack of leisure time is the real status symbol. Anat Keinan discusses what that means for consumer marketing. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

How Should Advertisers Respond to Consumer Demand for Whiter Skin?

by Dina Gerdeman

Skin-lightening creams are a fast-growing market in India. Rohit Deshpandé explores what firms should do when a product is decidedly popular—but may be promoting discrimination. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Can Wynton Marsalis and Lincoln Center Save Jazz Music?

Re: Rohit Deshpande

With its listenership in steep decline, jazz legend Wynton Marsalis is looking to rebrand the genre and engineer its comeback. Rohit Deshpande discusses his recent case study on the effort. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

How Wayfair Built a Furniture Brand from Scratch

Re: Thales S. Teixeira

What was once a collection of 240 home furnishing sites is now a single, successful brand, Wayfair.com. How that brand developed over time and the challenges and opportunities presented by search engine marketing are discussed by Thales Teixeira. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Standardized Color in the Food Industry: The Co-Creation of the Food Coloring Business in the United States, 1870–1940

by Ai Hisano

Beginning in the late 19th century, US food manufacturers tried to create the “right” color of foods that many consumers would recognize and in time take for granted. The United States became a leading country in the food coloring business with the rise of extensive mass marketing. By 1938, when Congress enacted the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the food coloring business had become a central and permanent component of food marketing strategies. This paper shows how food manufacturers, dye makers, and regulators co-created the food coloring business. Food-coloring practices became integrated into an entire strategy of manufacturing and marketing in the food industry.

Turning One Thousand Customers into One Million

by Thales S. Teixeira and Michael Blanding

In the second part of a series on growing startups, Thales S. Teixeira explains how Uber, Etsy, and Airbnb climbed from one thousand customers to one million. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

6 Lessons from Donald Trump's Winning Marketing Manual

by John A. Quelch

Donald Trump's upset election win offers six lessons for marketers looking to beat the odds and overcome powerful competitors, says John A. Quelch. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Managers' Cultural Background and Disclosure Attributes

by Francois Brochet, Gregory S. Miller, Patricia Naranjo, and Gwen Yu

How does the cultural background of executives affect the way in which they communicate with investors? This paper examines the impact of cultural backgrounds of individual managers based on their ethnic heritage on their disclosure narrative during earnings conference calls. Among the findings, managers from individualistic cultures are likely to use a more positive tone, use greater self-reference, and make fewer apologies in the Q&A portion of the conference calls. The capital market reacts to disclosure style in a predictable way: optimistic tone is associated with a positive stock return following the call. However, market participants do not adjust their interpretation of disclosure tone for firm value based on the cultural background of the management team.

Three Critical Mistakes Digital Businesses Make With Content

by Michael Blanding

Do companies really understand the nature of today's digital transformation? Bharat Anand's book The Content Trap offers a new view of digital strategy that shifts the focus from "produce the best content" to "create the best connections." Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Clayton Christensen: The Theory of Jobs To Be Done

by Dina Gerdeman

Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma was a classic text on how companies fail. In a new book, Competing Against Luck, Christensen tackles the opposite challenge: how companies succeed. First lesson, discover what job consumers are hiring your product to do. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

The Twitter Election

by John Quelch and Thales Teixeira

Twitter is emerging as one of the most important players in the 2016 presidential election, write John Quelch and Thales Teixeira. But does it have the power to determine which candidate will win? Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Behavioral Economists Can Make You a Healthier Consumer and Smarter Marketer

by Amelia Kunhardt

Video What’s behind the decisions we make, especially when it comes to eating well and losing weight? Can companies motivate employees to make healthier decisions? Leslie John discusses "interventions" to help people make better decisions when it comes to their health. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

More Effective Sports Sponsorship—Combining and Integrating Key Resources and Capabilities of International Sports Events and Their Major Sponsors

by Ragnar Lund and Stephen A. Greyser

This field-based study of the Union of European Football Associations and its main international sporting event, the European Championships, explores key organizational capabilities that underlie value creation and enhancement in an event’s portfolio of sponsorship relationships. Developing and employing these capabilities--collaborative, absorptive, adaptive, and learning--have positive results for the event as well as for its sponsors. When effectively undertaken and coordinated, the activities can lead to ongoing renewals of the sponsorship program and open the door for new sponsors. The study’s perspective is that of the event, unusual in research on sponsorship.

How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers

by Michael Blanding

Thales Teixeira studies three of the most successful “platform” startups to understand the chicken-and-egg challenge of how companies can attract their first customers. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.