Articles

Stop AI from Eroding Your Brand

Artificial intelligence is changing how companies operate and how customers experience their brands. New research suggests that companies with lower levels of “brand debt”—the trust, relevance, and...

LLMs Misunderstand Luxury Brands. Here's How to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy for AI.

As AI agents and LLMs increasingly mediate consumer choice, luxury brands face a distinct visibility and interpretation risk. New research shows that while models reliably process explicit cues...

What Brands Get Wrong About Sports Sponsorships-and How to Get Them Right

Companies spend billions sponsoring major sporting events, yet many still evaluate success primarily through exposure metrics such as logo visibility and immediate brand recall. New research suggests...

Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age

As AI accelerates product development and expands marketing's responsibilities, most marketing organizations are struggling to keep up because their operating model-sequential, siloed, and...

PR and Ethics in the Battle for Location-based Data

The Art of Discounting

As inflation reshapes consumer behavior, companies can no longer rely on blunt pricing power to drive growth. Strategic discounting-designed to attract price-sensitive customers while limiting...

Why Companies Don't Compete in the Middle Market

Brands always need to differentiate themselves. In analog times, that differentiation didn't have to be dramatic. That's because companies had limited visibility into individual customer behavior and...

What Consumers Really Want Brands to Do About Social Issues

As consumer expectations for brand values rise, many companies are unsure how to communicate social purpose without alienating customers. Research from NYU Sterns Center for Sustainable...

The Importance of Trust and Transparency in Retail Media Networks

Retail media networks (RMNs) are transforming how suppliers reach shoppers by combining advertising with transaction data to deliver personalized messages and measurable results at the point of...

A Good Rivalry Can Elevate Your Brand

An analysis of Twitter data from 2020 to 2022, including 100 brands across 20 product categories, found that referencing a rival competitor in marketing messages can boost consumer engagement and...

A Fast-Food Company Considers Dynamic Pricing (HBR Case Study and Commentary)

To respond to a volatile inflation crisis, should the CEO of Burger & Bites, a fictional fast-food chain, introduce dynamic pricing to its restaurants? The companys input costs are increasing quickly...

Using Gen AI for Early-Stage Market Research

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...

How Pop Mart Won Young Customers in a Fragmented Attention Economy

To win young customers who grow up in today's fragmented attention economy, leaders need to deploy strategies specifically tailored to the emotional and identity needs of these individuals. Analysis...

Research: Marketing Tech Is Broken. Here's How to Fix It.

Researchers surveyed senior marketers to learn about how they use marketing technology. They determined that the systems have modest impact, theyre not achieving their expected performance results,...

Research: Do You Know What Signals Your Logo's Colors Are Sending?

Color symbolism guides are a helpful starting point, but there are many factors that go into how your logo is perceived.

Forget What You Know About Search. Optimize Your Brand for LLMs.

How to sell your product when generative AI becomes the consumer.

Does the Chief Marketing Officer Role Need an Update?

Digital technologies, data, and AI are making the job more demanding and complex.

Research: How to Advertise to Distracted Consumers

In a world full of distractions, your best strategy may be to embrace them.

Research: How Top Reviewers Skew Online Ratings

Frequent reviewers have more stringent standards, which can lower scores for high-quality products. Here's how to fix that.

Research: How "Buy Now, Pay Later" Is Changing Consumer Spending

A study of 275,000 customers found that the option to pay in installments increased revenue - but was used most by financially constrained shoppers.

What Luxury Fashion Can Learn from the Wholesale Flower Market

Online luxury fashion retailers have been experiencing losses, and they all face the same challenges: How do you move inventory of a product with ephemeral value without destroying the perceived...

Research: For Influencers, Showing Your Inner Circle Can Boost Engagement

Observations from three experiments and a review of more than 55,000 Instagram posts.

Make Your Marketing a Force for Good

A four-part framework for campaigns that improve the world - and win over customers in the process.

Does Market Share Still Matter?

New research suggests that the metric doesn't mean what it used to.

Research: What Happens When Influencers Turn Off Comments

Seven studies examined the effects on their personal brands and product endorsements.

When It Comes to Influencers, Smaller Can Be Better

Though celebrity influencers get lots of attention, they often dont produce sales. When Bocconi Universitys Maximilian Beichert and colleagues looked at the data on close to 2 million purchases and...

Tap Employee-Creators to Transform Your Social Media Strategy

There is a growing trend of social media creators producing and sharing content about their jobs and employers on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Successful employee-creators can...

What Successful Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Get Right

At a time of struggle for brick-and-mortar retailing, some brands have successfully drawn foot traffic to stores. These companies deliver value that isn't easily replicated in the online channel,...

How Grocery Stores Should Respond to the Growth of Online Markets

During 2020-21 online grocery shopping soared from 3.4% to double digits as Covid-19 made customers reluctant to go into stores. Post Covid, online grocery shopping is still high, forecasted by...

Reinventing the Core Value Statement

Companies are moving beyond traditional core value statements to embrace more resonant and distinctive expressions of their ethos. This shift reflects a desire for authenticity and alignment with...

Inside the Success of South Korean Brands

The specific and effective strategies that catapulted these brands to global success.

Research: Smaller, More Precise Discounts Could Increase Your Sales

Retailers might think that bigger discounts attract more customers. But new research suggests thats not always true. Sometimes, a smaller discount that looks more precise - say 6.8% as compared to 7%...

What Makes Some Ads So Powerful

As a new marketer, it can be tempting to focus on ideating advertisements that are extra eye-catching and creative, hoping to capture the eyes, hearts, and minds of your customers. However, focusing...

How Your Business Should Tap into the Creator Economy

Creators arent just changing marketing. Theyre transforming product development, too. Creators can drive demand for specialized products, accelerating product life cycles and even changing what...

Dynamic Pricing Doesn't Have to Alienate Your Customers

Inflation-fatigued shoppers are witnessing prices fluctuate across categories with unprecedented scale and frequency - a trend often seen as yet another cunning commercial scheme. Is the extra profit...

Is That a TV Show or Are You Trying to Sell Me Something?

The storytelling power of ads that "go native."

When Advertising Meets the Meme

The simple effectiveness of the Wonderful Pistachios campaign, as part of our "Creative That Cracks the Code" series.

Be Funny (But Not Too Funny) In Your Ad Campaign

How Kia struck a humorous balance that led to double-digit growth.

A Unique Approach to Marketing Coca-Cola in Hong Kong

They turned an advertisement into a game - and people actually played.

How One Marketing Team Made AI Part of Its Daily Work

In todays always-on environment, AI tools can help marketers optimize and personalize their campaigns quickly and efficiently. But AI alone wont yield meaningful campaigns. Impact-driving work...

How Marketers Choose College Athlete Influencers

The authors research findings: Athletes image and quality of social media posts are more important than their follower counts, posts should feature sports more than personal content, and sexy imagery...

Should Your Brand Hire a Virtual Influencer?

Followers respond more favorably to sponsored posts by virtual influencers versus those by humans, costs are lower, and creating an influencer from scratch allows marketers to introduce more...

What Makes a Successful Celebrity Brand?

Celebrities have shifted from endorsing established brands to being influencers for established brands to drawing on their influence to create brands themselves. The authors examine what it takes to...

Why the Influencer Industry Needs Guardrails

The author argues for an industry in which unethical behavior is punished; professional expectations, pay, and desired outcomes are standardized; and creators are given the same rights and...

How Inclusive Brands Fuel Growth

Years before the Barbie movie phenomenon, leaders at Mattel became concerned that consumer perceptions of the famous doll were out of sync with demographic trends. The company conducted in-depth...

Southwest Airlines Is Playing with Brand Fire

Southwest Airlines is often used as a case study for a well-run business: it's consistently more profitable than its competitors, it's very disciplined about how it operates, and its customers are...

How Automakers Can Address Resistance to Self-Driving Cars

Research involving multiple experiments found that consumers have biased views of their driving abilities relative to those of other drivers and automated vehicles. These findings have implications...

Bailout Marketing - the Wrong Way

What sort of marketing message makes sense for the modern post-apocalyptic lending institution? Probably not this: I received a slick, expensive, 20-page brochure in the mail the other day from Bank...

Why Has the EV Market Stalled?

Surprisingly, the EV market has stalled in recent years. Why? Because the market has reached a difficult point in the technology-adoption lifecycle. Specifically, automakers and policymakers alike...

Lessons from the Bud Light Boycott, One Year Later

Six factors that make a brand more susceptible to consumer backlash.

Lessons from More Than 1,000 E-Commerce Pricing Tests

At most small and medium-sized e-commerce retailers, prices are typically set and updated in an ad hoc fashion without one clear owner. The process often starts by using a gross margin target,...