This case introduces the concept of inbound marketing, pulling customer prospects toward a business through the use of Web 2.0 tools and applications like blogging, search engine optimization, and social media. Students follow the growth of HubSpot, an entrepreneurial venture which, in its quest...

We introduce the idea of a massively categorical variable, a variable such as zip code that takes on too many values to treat in the standard manner. We show how to use a massively categorical variable directly as an explanatory variable. As an application of this concept, we explore several of...

In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to explain whether and when the introduction of a new retail store channel helps and hurts sales in existing direct channels. A conceptual framework separates short- and long-run effects by analyzing the capabilities of a channel that help...

Sales leaders often use threats of punishment to manage poor performers (i.e., laggards), but little research has examined the effect of these threats. The current research addresses this gap by investigating an intervention termed the “bench program” with a field-based quasi experiment and...

This paper highlights a logical contradiction in the currently accepted theory of choice. This contradiction occurs when a decision is reframed by adding a clone to the choice set. The current theory concludes that individuals have context-dependent preferences if they make consistent choices;...

Different objectives such as category demand expansion or market share stealing warrant the use of different marketing instruments. To help brand managers make informed decisions, it is essential that marketing mix models appropriately measure their effects. Random Utility Models (RUM) that have...

Cohort-level retention rates typically increase over time, and the beta-geometric (BG) distribution has proven to be a robust model for capturing and projecting these patterns into the future. According to this model, the phenomenon of increasing cohort-level retention rates is purely due to...

This article introduces a newly discovered property of discrete-choice models, which I call the Invariant Proportion of Substitution (IPS). Like the Independence from Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) property, IPS implies individual behavior that is counterintuitive in the context of choice among...

This article addresses the question of whether lump-sum bonuses motivate salespeople to work harder to attain incremental orders or whether they induce salespeople to play timing games (behaviors that increase incentive payments without providing incremental benefits to the firm) with their...

The marketing literature often argues that the random coefficient logit model gives more realistic results than the homogeneous logit. The purpose of this paper is to show that the random coefficients logit improves upon, but does not completely solve the problems of the homogeneous logit. We...