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New research on product marketing from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including product launches and product positioning.
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For Entrepreneurs, Blown Deadlines Can Crush Big Ideas

by Rachel Layne

After a successful launch, entrepreneurs struggle to anticipate the complexities of product upgrades, says research by Andy Wu and Aticus Peterson. They offer three tips to help startups avoid disastrous delays. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Accounting for Product Impact in the Consumer Finance Industry

by George Serafeim and Katie Trinh

A framework and method for measuring and monetizing product impact across industries, applying it to two competitors in the consumer finance space.

How to Launch a New Biosciences Product: Start Small or Dive in?

C16 Biosciences wants to replace palm oil, a major contributor to deforestation, with a lab-grown substitute. But CEO Shara Ticku faces a tough decision in bringing the product to market. Jeff Bussgang discusses his case study. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Don't Turn Your Marketing Function Over to AI Just Yet

by Kristen Senz

Lacking human insight, artificial intelligence will be limited when it comes to helping marketers open the black box of market prediction, says Tomomichi Amano. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Lipstick Tips: How Influencers Are Making Over Beauty Marketing

by Dina Gerdeman

Influencer marketing has quickly become the best way to reach beauty consumers, proving more effective than celebrity endorsements and company ads, according to research by Alessia Vettese. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

The Ferrari Way

by Michael Blanding

Secretive sports car maker Ferrari opens up to Stefan Thomke about how it has bucked industry trends to achieve success. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence

by Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca

This study empirically explores Google’s decision to tie its new reviews product to the top of its search results, excluding competitors. Results suggest that such "tying" can facilitate dominant platforms’ entry into adjacent markets, even when the tied product is of worse quality compared to existing options.

Shipping Fees and Product Assortment in Online Retail

by Chaoqun Chen and Donald Ngwe

This study highlights a strong link between an online retailer’s product assortment decisions and shipping policies in determining purchase outcomes and profits. Consumers are less sensitive to shipping fees than to product prices, but free shipping for orders above the minimum is a strong motivator for increasing average basket sizes.

Does Le Pliage Help or Hurt the Longchamp Luxury Brand?

Longchamp's iconic but affordable Le Pliage bag is a conundrum for the company, explains Jill Avery in this podcast. Does an affordable luxury product work against the top-tier brand? Open for comment; 0 Comments.

The Revolution in Advertising: From Don Draper to Big Data

The Mad Men of advertising are being replaced by data scientists and analysts. In this podcast, marketing professor John Deighton and advertising legend Sir Martin Sorrell discuss the positives and negatives of digital marketing. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

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; 0 Comments.

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; 0 Comments.

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; 0 Comments.

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.

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; 0 Comments.

Invest in Information or Wing It? A Model of Dynamic Pricing with Seller Learning

by Huang Guofang, Hong Luo & Jing Xia

Dealers who need to price idiosyncratic products--like houses, artwork, and used cars--often struggle with a lack of information about the demand for their specific items. Analyzing sales data from the used-car retail market, the authors of this paper develop a model of dynamic pricing for idiosyncratic products, showing that seller learning has an impact on pricing dynamics through a rich set of mechanisms. Overall, findings suggest a potentially high return to taking a more serious information-based approach to pricing idiosyncratic products.

How Our Brain Determines if the Product is Worth the Price

by Carmen Nobel

Are consumers more likely to buy if they see the price before the product, or vice versa? Uma Karmarkar and colleagues scan the brains of shoppers to find out. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Better by the Bundle?

by Dina Gerdeman

Video game companies do it, fast-food restaurants, too. Why don't more companies bundle products and services together in one package at a bargain price? Research by Assistant Professor Vineet Kumar. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

How to Brand a Next-Generation Product

by Carmen Nobel

Upgrades to existing product lines make up a huge part of corporate research and development activity, and with every upgrade comes the decision of how to brand it. Harvard Business School marketing professors John T. Gourville and Elie Ofek teamed up with London Business School's Marco Bertini to suss out the best practices for naming next-generation products. Key concepts include: Companies often take one of two tacks in naming a next-generation product—the sequential naming approach or the complete name change approach. Experimental research showed that each naming approach affects customer expectations. With a name change, research participants expected features that were distinctly different or new. With a name continuation, they just expected improved performance on existing features. Companies must assess risk versus reward when branding a product upgrade, weighing the excitement generated by a new name against the danger of scaring away customers who worry that new features pose the threat of new glitches and a steep learning curve. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

The Dynamic Effects of Bundling as a Product Strategy

by Timothy Derdenger & Vineet Kumar

This paper investigates the practice of bundling as a product strategy, and identifies how consumers make choices between products and bundles in a dynamic environment. Authors Timothy Derdenger and Vineet Kumar look at the handheld video game market to study bundling in a platform setting with the goal of investigating several key questions of interest to practitioners who make product decisions: First, do consumers value bundles over and beyond their component products, indicating a synergy, which some researchers have hypothesized? Second, have there been differing opinions on whether mixed bundling, that is offering both the bundle and individual products for sale, is more effective than offering only pure bundles or even compared to offering only the products for sale? Given the prevalence of bundling in technology markets, it is critical to understand whether bundling is more effective in environments with strong network effects or with weak network effects. Key concepts include: Consumers have a negative synergy effect, that is they are willing to pay less for the bundle than for the individual console and game, leading to the question of whether introducing such bundles can increase revenue. Because bundles act similar to damaged goods, they work well in dynamically segmenting consumers and allow for purchases to occur earlier in time—the presence of bundles induces consumers to purchase earlier rather than wait. The time shifting of hardware purchases has a strong effect on software sales, since more consumers who own consoles will purchase video games over a longer time frame. Mixed bundling is especially effective compared to pure bundling, and the authors find that moving to pure bundling would reduce sales by over 20 percent. Strong network effects do not enhance the value of bundling, suggesting that bundling may instead prove more useful in settings with weak network effects. Bundling is thus a strategy that could serve as a substitute to creating stronger network effects. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.