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Marketing

Marketing

Overview Faculty Curriculum Seminars & Conferences Awards & Honors Doctoral Students
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    • 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.

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    • 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.

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    • Featured Article

    AI Companions Reduce Loneliness

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

    Chatbots are now able to engage in sophisticated conversations with consumers in the domain of relationships, providing a potential coping solution to widescale societal loneliness. Behavioral research provides little insight into whether these applications (apps) are effective at alleviating loneliness. We address this question by focusing on “artificial intelligence (AI) companions”: apps designed to provide consumers with synthetic interaction partners. Study 1 examines user reviews of AI companion apps and finds correlational evidence suggesting that these apps help alleviate loneliness. Study 2 finds that AI companions successfully alleviate loneliness on par only with interacting with another person and more than other activities such as watching YouTube videos. Moreover, consumers underestimate the degree to which AI companions improve their loneliness. Study 3 uses a longitudinal design and finds that an AI companion consistently provides momentary reductions in loneliness after use over the course of a week. Study 4 provides evidence that both the chatbots’ performance and, especially, whether it makes users feel heard, explain reductions in loneliness. Study 5 provides an additional robustness check for the loneliness-alleviating benefits of AI companions and shows that self-disclosure and distraction alone do not explain AI companions’ effectiveness.

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    • Featured Article

    AI Companions Reduce Loneliness

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

    Chatbots are now able to engage in sophisticated conversations with consumers in the domain of relationships, providing a potential coping solution to widescale societal loneliness. Behavioral research provides little insight into whether these applications (apps) are effective at alleviating loneliness. We address this question by focusing on...

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    • Featured Publication

    Brand Teasing: How Brands Build Strong Relationships by Making Fun of Their Consumers

    By: Demi Oba, Holly S Howe, and Gavan J Fitzsimons

    "Editor's Choice" Distinction in the June 2025 Issue of Journal of Consumer Research

    Popular brands like Wendy’s, Postmates, and RyanAir have gained notoriety by making fun of their consumers, but is this an effective strategy to build strong consumer relationships? Across 11 (seven pre-registered) studies, using lab data, field data, and a variety of analytical approaches, the current research demonstrates that teasing communication increases consumer engagement with and connection to the brand compared to merely funny or neutral communication.

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    • Featured Publication

    Brand Teasing: How Brands Build Strong Relationships by Making Fun of Their Consumers

    By: Demi Oba, Holly S Howe, and Gavan J Fitzsimons

    "Editor's Choice" Distinction in the June 2025 Issue of Journal of Consumer Research

    Popular brands like Wendy’s, Postmates, and RyanAir have gained notoriety by making fun of their consumers, but is this an effective strategy to build strong consumer relationships? Across 11 (seven pre-registered) studies, using lab data, field data,...

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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 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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    ImageImage
    • 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...

    More Information

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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

The Asymmetry of Gender-Fluid Trends

By: Maren Hoff and Silvia Bellezza
  • August 2026 |
  • Article |
  • Journal of Consumer Research
Marketers and consumers are rapidly embracing gender-fluid products that fundamentally challenge the conventional associations of masculinity and femininity. In theory, manifestations of gender fluidity in the marketplace respond to shifting gender norms toward more inclusivity. Accordingly, consumers believe that the representation of traditionally male and female styles in these trends should be even. In contrast with these balanced views, this research demonstrates that gender-fluid trends to date skew toward traditionally male styles and that the corresponding adoption of gender-fluid products is driven relatively more by female and nonbinary consumers. Using a multimethod approach (including trend analyses of over 100,000 baby names, deep learning on a dataset of 200,000 products, and a series of experiments), this research defines gender fluidity in marketing, distinguishes it from related constructs such as gender-bending, unisex, and androgyny, and reveals a skewness in gender-fluid trends to date. It further demonstrates that women’s and nonbinary individuals’ heightened awareness of male advantages in society and lower fear of negative evaluation drive their greater adoption of gender-fluid styles.
Keywords: Product Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Social Issues
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Wix: Rising to the AI Moment

By: Elie Ofek, Niron Hashai and Orna Dan
  • July 2026 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Founded in 2006, Wix offered a cloud-based platform that enabled anyone to create websites and build, manage, and grow a business online without technical expertise. The SaaS (software-as-a-service) company grew rapidly before and after going public in 2013. User adoption accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as entrepreneurs and companies rushed to strengthen their online presence. By late 2025, however, Wix faced mounting uncertainty. Although valued at approximately $5 billion, the company operated in a software sector increasingly pressured by the rise of generative AI and conversational interfaces, developments that drove down valuations across SaaS firms and raised fundamental questions about the future role of websites themselves. As AI agents, assistants, and avatars increasingly shaped interactions between consumers and brands, Wix leadership had to determine how aggressively to defend and extend its core website business versus investing in disruptive and moonshot initiatives with longer time horizons and higher risk-reward profiles that could reposition the company for a radically different digital future. The company’s acquisition of Base44 and growing interest in “vibe coding”—the use of natural language prompts to create software applications—further highlighted both the opportunities and challenges posed by AI-driven software development. The case explores how Wix approached prioritization across competing innovation projects, evaluated opportunities in adjacent markets such as enterprise applications and content creation, and grappled with the possibility that traditional websites might eventually give way to AI-mediated digital experiences. More broadly, the case examines how established companies can adapt when technological change threatens not only their products, but also the assumptions underlying their entire industry.
Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Technology Adoption; Disruptive Innovation; Internet and the Web; Digital Strategy; Resource Allocation; E-commerce; Innovation Strategy; Technology Industry; Web Services Industry
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La Roche-Posay: Growing L'Oreal's Active Cosmetics Brand

By: Jill Avery
  • July 2026 |
  • Teaching Note |
  • Faculty Research
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 520-035. At 1 billion in revenue, La Roche-Posay had recently become the number one dermocosmetics brand in the world. It was time to make some significant marketing decisions related to brand positioning to try to accelerate La Roche-Posay’s future growth trajectory as consumer interest in dermocosmetics was growing rapidly and, as a result, new competitors were aggressively entering the segment. As a result, the market potential for dermocosmetics was quickly moving from a niche segment of patients with pre-existing pathological skin conditions to a broader swath of consumers interested in overall skin health and skin pathology prevention. As a result, La Roche-Posay had the opportunity to adjust its customer value proposition for consumers, currently oriented toward consumers with specific skin pathologies with a promise grounded in medical research and relationships with dermatologists, to speak to a broader group of target markets with a more emotional promise. Many growth paths beckoned and the team had to decide which were worth investing in: channel expansion, geographic expansion, or products and services expansions, versus doubling down on the existing strategy to increase market penetration with existing markets.
Keywords: Brand Management; Brand Positioning; Growth Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Marketing Channels; Brands and Branding; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Global Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Positioning; Competitive Strategy; Expansion; Segmentation; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; France
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AI-powered Early Intervention for Depression and Anxiety: A Randomized Clinical Trial

By: Julie Y.A. Cachia, Xuan Zhao, Wenxi Pu, Chi Liao, Merel Keijsers, Julian De Freitas and Rebecca Fortgang
  • 2026 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Importance: Depression and anxiety are prevalent and disabling, yet most individuals receive inadequate or no care. Purpose-built generative AI platforms may offer scalable first-line support, though large-trial evidence remains limited. Objective: To determine whether Flourish, an AI-powered mental health platform, prevents and reduces depression and anxiety symptoms compared with care-as-usual. Design: Preregistered, parallel-group, superiority randomized clinical trial conducted in 2025, with assessments at weeks 0, 2, 4, and 6. Setting: A large North American university. Participants: A total of 1,137 college students aged 18 years or older was recruited through a research participation system without symptom-based screening and randomized to treatment or care-as-usual. 850 participants (74.6%) completed the final Week 6 follow-up. Intervention: Participants assigned to treatment received Flourish, which offered self-guided support informed by cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, positive psychology, and motivational interviewing, and were instructed to use it at least twice weekly. Participants assigned to care-as-usual retained access to usual mental health resources. Main Outcomes and Measures: Preregistered primary outcomes were depression (Patient Health Questionnaire-2) and anxiety symptoms (Generalized Anxiety Disorder-2), assessed biweekly. Results: Among 1,137 participants, mean (SD) age was 20.77 (5.34) years, and 853 (75.0%) were female. Symptom trajectories were more favorable in treatment (vs control) for depression (condition × time: = 0.03; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.01; P = .006) and anxiety ( = 0.04; 95% CI, 0.06 to 0.01; P = .001). Among participants with elevated baseline symptom severity, treatment increased rates of meaningful change for depressive symptoms (52.3% vs 31.7%; risk ratio [RR], 1.65 [95% CI, 1.16-2.34]; number needed to treat [NNT], 4.9 [95% CI, 2.9-14.8]) and anxiety symptoms (50.6% vs 38.1%; RR, 1.33 [95% CI, 1.05-1.68]; NNT, 8.0 [95% CI, 4.4-44.5]). Participants with low baseline symptoms showed less symptom worsening at 6 weeks. No adverse events attributable to the intervention were identified. Conclusions and Relevance: This trial demonstrates that a purpose-built generative AI platform can serve as a scalable first-line mental health tool, effective for prevention and early intervention of depression and anxiety symptoms in an unscreened general population.
Keywords: Health Testing and Trials; AI and Machine Learning
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Automated Comment Moderation Enhances Social Media Advertising Performance

By: Jiwoon Park and Julian De Freitas
  • 2026 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Social media advertising exposes brands not only to potential customers but also to unfiltered consumer discourse in the form of user comments. While comments can enhance authenticity and engagement, they also introduce reputational risks through spam, hate speech, and negative user-generated content. Despite the increasing prevalence of AI-powered comment moderation solutions, little causal evidence exists on whether moderation (i.e., hiding harmful comments) improves ad effectiveness. Across six empirical studies—including two large-scale field experiments and four online studies—we demonstrate that automated moderation of harmful comments causally improves ad performance, including conversion rates, return on ad spend, and purchase intentions. We also identify two important platform-governance boundary conditions: the gains from moderation depend on whether the platform is transparent about the brand’s moderation behavior, and what types of comments are moderated. At the same time, the moderation effect persists when the brand is transparent about its own moderation practices. We advance theory on context effects in social media advertising, by uncovering the first targeted, preventative intervention for avoiding negative adjacencies. For managers, the results show that AI-assisted comment moderation impacts real ad performance but may be contingent upon platform-level transparency design.
Keywords: Social Media; Advertising; AI and Machine Learning; Brands and Branding; Digital Platforms
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AI for Proactive Mental Health: A Multi-Institutional, Longitudinal, Randomized Controlled Trial

By: Julie Y.A. Cachia, Xuan Zhao, John Hunter, Delancy Wu, Eta Lin and Julian De Freitas
  • August 2026 |
  • Article |
  • New England Journal of Medicine AI
Young adults today face unprecedented mental health challenges, yet many hesitate to seek support due to barriers such as accessibility, stigma, and time constraints. Bite-sized well-being interventions offer a promising solution to preventing mental distress before it escalates to clinical levels, but have not yet been delivered through personalized, interactive, and scalable technology. We conducted the first multi-institutional, longitudinal, preregistered randomized controlled trial of a generative AI-powered mobile app (“Flourish”) designed to address this gap. Over six weeks in Fall 2024, 486 undergraduate students from three U.S. institutions were randomized to receive app access or to a care-as-usual control condition. Participants instructed to use the Flourish app twice per week reported significantly greater positive affect, resilience, and social well-being (i.e., increased belonging, closeness to community, and reduced loneliness) and were buffered against declines in mindfulness and flourishing. These findings suggest that, with purposeful and ethical design, generative AI can deliver proactive, population-level well-being interventions that produce measurable benefits.
Keywords: Generative Ai; Mental Health; Loneliness; Intervention; AI Ethics; Belonging; Flourishing; Mindfulness; Positive Affect; AI and Machine Learning; Ethics; Well-being; Health Care and Treatment
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BrandBastion Dashboard

By: Julian De Freitas
  • June 2026 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
Supplement to HBS Case No. 526-013.
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Innovating with Generative AI: A Human Bottleneck Framework

By: Julian De Freitas, Ayelet Israeli, Gideon Nave, Artem Timoshenko and Olivier Toubia
  • 2026 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
We propose a human bottleneck perspective for understanding how generative AI transforms the innovation process. The central premise is that many constraints traditionally plaguing the innovation process are cognitive and social in origin, rooted in how people generate ideas, evaluate novelty, and communicate through social systems. Generative AI does not act uniformly on these constraints. At each stage, it can deepen some bottlenecks while alleviating others, and predicting these outcomes requires understanding the underlying mechanisms of the constraint itself. We identify bottlenecks in four stages of the innovation process: ideation, screening and testing, preference measurement and consumer insight, diffusion, and market learning. By grounding analysis in human behavior rather than rapidly changing AI capabilities, we offer a framework for assessing whether new developments alleviate or intensify the bottlenecks that matter most at each stage. We also distinguish bottlenecks likely to narrow as capabilities improve from those rooted in enduring human constraints. We further discuss AI-related issues that cut across the entire innovation pipeline, challenging the very existence and structure of the traditional innovation process.
Keywords: Innovation Strategy; AI and Machine Learning; Product Development; Behavior
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Marketing Unit
Harvard Business School
Morgan Hall
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Marketing@hbs.edu