marketing in a social world

There is no doubt that obesity is a problem in the US. Can we nudge our way out of this problem? Brian Wansink of Cornell University presented his work at a HBS marketing seminar yesterday. I hadn’t realized that he was the bottomless soup experimenter! It is possibly the one most amazing experiment in marketing ...

Back in 1962, Harvard Business School opened its doors to admit women into its full-time MBA program. Now, women make up about 40% of the fulle-time MBA class. Is the battle for inclusiveness over? I just sat in on a class on International Women’s Day (Mar 8) at HBS. It was led by Anita Elberse ...

What is the family? Through qualitative observations of Northern American families over the decades, Barry Wellman from University of Toronto argued that sociologists initial studied families as groups of individuals functioning as one unit. Just as other groups are increasingly viewed as networks, so families are undergoing the same transformation. Technology, in fact, has effected ...

This week’s Networked Business seminar featured Susan Crawford speaking about her book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. Her basic premise is that cable/fibre carries large fixed costs that discourage new entrants, that the combination of content creation and content delivery exacerbates the problem, and advocates a public ...

Do firms emotionally connect with consumers simply to build their brand? Or is there more? When does it work? Jonathan Mildenhall from Coca-Cola gave a presentation at HBS on Content 2020 (videos at the end of this entry). He filled in the backstory for each section, and one of the best was a program with ...

Just how easily are people influenced by others?  Opower, an energy-savings company, claims that showing people how much energy their neighbors use can motivate people to take energy-saving measures.  This was one of many presentations at the inaugural Social Media and Behavioral Economics Conference at Harvard Law School. What struck me is not so much that ...