Perusal of the business news on any given day reveals corporate behaviour unbecoming a civil member of society. Whole Foods Market’s CEO John Mackey used an alias on Yahoo Finance’s bulletin board for seven years to post comments that maligned rival Wild Oats Markets while boosting perceptions of his own firm. Both Uber and Lyft claim the other secretly […]
Could a single tweet destroy your company? Just a few years ago, a question like that might have seemed absurd. But now that possibility is something that executives and investors around the world are increasingly thinking and worrying about. Perhaps the most prominent evidence of this trend arrived at the start of 2018, when BlackRock’s Larry Fink laid out […]
In 1961, Daniel Ellsberg (who is perhaps best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam war) considered a thought experiment involving two urns, each containing 100 balls. The first urn contained exactly 50 black balls and 50 red balls, while the second contained 100 black and red balls in […]
Reputation plays an important signalling role in an imperfect information world and companies endeavour to preserve it. In this study, I evaluate empirically the role of reputation for companies that engage in Twitter. The results confirm that getting negative tweets, many expressing grievances, strongly correlates with low firm performance, suggesting the importance of social media (SM) in times when […]
Last April, a bloodied passenger, Dr. David Dao, was dragged from his seat and off the plane of United Express Flight 3411 after refusing to relinquish his seat for United Airlines employees. The next day, United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz tried to justify the removal of Dr. Dao in a public statement. He also sent an email to the […]
The luxury market is one of the most rapidly expanding industries around the world. Despite the financial crisis in 2008, the market for personal luxury goods has grown three times in size over the last 20 years. The industry has undergone, over the last decade, two major changes that have reshuffled the luxury landscape.
First, there has been an evolution […]
It was 1974. The UK market for wine was beginning to move. Branded contenders were making swift headway amongst unsophisticated UK wine drinkers. Key contenders were German, Blue Nun and Black Tower. And Mateus Rose from Portugal was also courting UK consumers. Despite these incursions, the market was still predominantly French with wines from across the channel in widest […]
When donating to charities, people expect their money to be spent wisely. However, since donors are not the recipients of final goods and services, they cannot easily assess their quality. Given that large scandals involving charities are covered in press again and again (for example, Kids Company in UK in 2015, or Unicef in Germany in 2006), the reported […]
During the U.S. presidential campaign of 2016, the media greatly downplayed the chances of Donald Trump’s electoral success, because many of this candidate’s proposals seemed unfeasible, or improbable. What political pundits had overlooked, however, was the power of emotions.
More recently, in the UK, Theresa May’s supposed “inability” to show emotion to the public proved fatal in the elections, and […]
It’s no secret that sending spices to cooking bloggers, makeup samples to YouTube-tutorial stars or the hottest headphones to pop idols is a great way to increase sales.
But how do you know which recipe maven is going to maximise your product and yield new customers? The most fabulous recipe is no help if no one sees it. A persuader […]
Social media in the age of ubiquitous computing connects people, enabling them to share personal and professional experiences. Back in the beginning of the 21st century, businesses did not pay much attention to social media, considering it as a personal space for a network of people to hang out. From 2010 on, social media platforms have elicited attention as […]
It was a shocking scene, and it achieved instant liftoff in cyberspace. For days on end in April, the video of a bloodied passenger being dragged off a United Airlines plane by his arms seemed to play in a continuous loop on the internet, social media and cable TV.
The predictable result was a full-blown reputational crisis for United – […]
Organisations ranging from giants such as Apple and Amazon to small wineries and fashion boutiques regularly commit resources to persuading others to tout their innovative products. The results of these efforts are often mixed – some can build a passionate following that spreads news of how groundbreaking or remarkable a product might be, and some waste resources on customers […]
For a couple of weeks now, I am the proud owner of a wireless wrist device that tracks my physical activity, heart rate and sleep. It gives me real-time feedback and nudges me towards a healthier behaviour. Along with the device comes an app that allows me to monitor my weight, calorie- and water intake. The app further provides a […]
Endorsement and certification of brands have hit the mainstream, being used by both small firms and large multinationals in multiple product categories. Even old established global brands, such as Cadbury Dairy and Kit Kat chocolate created by Quaker businesses, are being offered with a certification label – the Fairtrade label. But what purpose do these certification labels serve? Who […]
In corporate offices, clients traditionally occupy dedicated and contained spaces that are segregated from staff areas and amenities. These spaces are designed as microcosms for meeting and entertaining, often contained in the most desirable parts of buildings with the best views and with the most luxurious interior design. This approach carefully plans a sequence of arrival spaces and ‘protected routes’ […]
A standard definition of dynamic pricing in airline markets typically focuses on how fares evolve over the booking period that precedes a flight’s take-off. Our research shows that such a definition is lacking because it fails to connect fare changes to some guiding principles of revenue management, defined as the combined methods used by carriers to set their fares. […]
Bad news for pushy sales people: putting pressure on us to buy now or miss out doesn’t necessarily make us go for limited-time offers. In fact, a super-short ultimatum makes it less likely we’ll bite.
In a recent experiment, we gave participants a series of time-limited offers to discover their motivations for accepting or rejecting the opportunity. Offers were actually […]
The downside of digital giants like Facebook and Google includes the increase in fake news, political polarisation, the dumbing down of debate and the long-term decline in print journalism as newspapers lose readers and advertising to these platforms. But a combination of problems with digital advertising – fraud, mismeasurement, and programmatic ad placement on undesirable sites – means that […]
Countless times top managers newly appointed to a company immediately announce a better future for their stakeholders, one they declare with conviction will be notably different from the past. Many want to distance themselves from what came before, which they were not part of and in any case cannot change. So they direct attention forward by promising: “We can […]
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