Did you “Elf Yourself” last holiday season? OfficeMax’s seasonal marketing campaign featured a viral Web component which allowed customers to superimpose an image of their own face on an animated dancing elf. According to Internet tracking service comScore, more than 17 million people visited the Elf Yourself Web site during the 2007 holiday season. But did all of those unique visitors translate into increased sales? The answer is not really: the company’s reported total sales in Q4 2007 were down 2.6%. The economy’s slide hasn’t helped either; in 2008, OfficeMax reported that its 2008 Q4 earnings were down more than 14%.

Ava Seave, an adjunct associate professor in Finance and Economics, recently blogged about the correlation between viral marketing success and sales totals. Seave suggests that marketers examine traditional metrics to gauge the success of their campaigns. She writes:

Viral marketing can decrease acquisition costs for new customers because your current customers essentially endorse your product when they send along a game or video they think is funny or interesting, and, of course, is associated with your product.

However, the acquisition cost calculation needs to be done over time, since a viral marketing campaign almost never leads to direct sales from that game or video viewing. The right goals for a viral campaign should be a lot more old school: Does this campaign generate leads and does it help with brand recognition?

Judging a viral campaign’s success for lead generation is straight forward — count the number of the leads that close and judge the quality — i.e. total revenue — of the new customers. To count, how many leads land on the registration form and actually fill in the information, and how many abandon? What percentage of leads make a transaction? What is the cost of the lead and the cost of the order?

Compare these statistics to all your other sources, naturally. Does this campaign help with brand recognition is a harder question to pull out a quantitative answer. You can point to the number of downloads or pass-alongs as new exposures to your brand, and we assume exposure will lead to recognition. You also could look at what terms are put into search engines that lead to your site and determine if this indicates the effectiveness of the campaign.

Photo credit: Judy Baxter

The key challenge that healthcare enterprise leaders face is determining how to drive innovation while addressing problems of affordability, inefficiency and gaps in quality. This task is now complicated by strong economic headwinds that limit the resources available to attack these problems. Industry executives are also dealing with new sets of competitive and regulatory pressures on their efforts to drive business growth.

At Columbia Business School’s 5th Annual Healthcare Conference held in New York City on November 21, over 500 students, alumni and other professionals heard more than 40 speakers and panelists discuss these issues.

The featured healthcare leaders said they are embracing change to develop creative solutions to the industry’s growing problems and to provide attractive investment opportunities on a global basis. A career strategies panel of executive and corporate recruiters also presented their views on the skills and talents necessary for healthcare professionals to succeed in this dynamic environment. This was followed by a concluding career fair and networking reception with the conference’s 17 corporate sponsors.

Ed Ludwig ’75, chairman and CEO of BD (Becton, Dickinson), gave the opening keynote address. Ludwig said that a successful global healthcare company must use technology, scale, global reach and operational excellence to offer value-added products. These products should reduce costs, enhance the quality of patient care and generate sustainable earnings growth.

Following his remarks, four concurrent panels took place in the morning session on the topics of pharma and biotech, medical devices, diagnostics and payor/provider issues.

The pharma and biotech panel discussed the trend among companies to narrow their therapeutic priorities, focus on biologics, pursue licensing and target acquisitions and seek enhanced productivity and cost savings. Numerous early-stage biotechnology companies are turning to larger pharma and biotechnology firms to survive as they are unable to secure capital from the public market. Global medical device companies are seeking to introduce innovative and cost-effective products in a challenging regulatory and pricing/reimbursement environment and pursuing acquisitions and new markets to meet growth objectives. The consensus of the payor/ provider panel was that any healthcare reform in 2009 would likely be incremental due largely to economic and political headwinds, and that a key focus would be on information technology and expanding access to those without insurance coverage.

Robert Essner, former Chairman and CEO of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and now executive-in-residence at Columbia Business School, provided the lunchtime keynote speech. He suggested that although the pharma industry faces significant challenges, the combination of new drugs, biologics and vaccines in key areas of unmet need (e.g. Alzheimer’s, cancer, congestive heart failure) and the massive influx of informed baby boomers, who are demanding health solutions, provides favorable long-term growth prospects for innovative global pharmaceutical companies.

Three afternoon panels covered M&A, life science investments and emerging markets. It is anticipated that healthcare M&A will remain active across all sectors and that consolidation among Big Pharma companies appears inevitable. Early-stage life science companies and investors face a capital squeeze, which is threatening the viability of existing companies with lower levels of funds available for new investment. Emerging markets are an increasing focus for global pharmaceutical and medical device companies that are seeking new markets for their products.

The final panel of the day focused on the changing talent acquisition and development strategies of major healthcare enterprises. Panelists commented that successful leaders will need to have global and cross-functional experiences; that employees should be open to lateral moves that broaden their skills and experiences; and that healthcare companies considering new hires are seeking a broader “toolkit” of skills that reach beyond the traditional focus on healthcare backgrounds.

For more information about the conference and sponsors visit www.cbshealthcareconference.com.

To combat falling membership and scattered leadership, the Girl Scouts launched a new strategy in 2005. Five years later, the plan to increase participation appears to be working — at least in New York City where the New York Times recently reported a boom in troops.

The case of the Girl Scouts provides key lessons for strategy, says management professor Willie Pietersen. His new book, Strategic Learning (Wiley, March 2010), examines how organizations can turn market insights into strategic actions. In it, he uses the example of the Girl Scouts, with whom he has worked as a strategic adviser since 2004.

“The Girl Scouts are a movement rather than a legally aligned organization. It’s similar to a franchise operation,” Pietersen says.

The movement’s new strategy entailed redefining its customers and its winning proposition clearly, restating its mission and setting new priorities. Additionally, each of the organization’s 312 independent councils was required to set its own priorities, based on local markets, in alignment with the movement’s.

“After a total strategy was defined as a central idea, a local strategy was created for each independent council,” he continues. “They aligned their own propositions and priorities as a direct translation of what the total organization was trying to do. That gave coherence.”

In order to further streamline the Girl Scouts’ efforts, the number of councils was reduced from 312 to 109. “This was done to improve the implementation effectiveness of the strategy that had already been defined,” Pietersen says. The Girl Scouts made other tactical changes, including shifting the emphasis away from earning merit badges to learning about topics, like health and wellness or financial literacy, and using online tools to foster engagement. A key point in the strategic learning sequence is that structure should always follow strategy, Pietersen says.

Pietersen cautions that independent subsidiaries cannot automatically align with the central mission but should instead develop their own priorities. “They have to do their own situation analysis and learn about their own local markets,” he says. “They can translate that information into an aligned winning proposition.”

Willie Pietersen is teaching the Columbia Business School Executive Education program “Creating and Executing Breakthrough Strategy,” taking place May 16–21, 2010.

Management professor Rita McGrath says experimentation must be an integral part of a company’s strategy in order to remain competitive in the future.

“The level of uncertainty and speed of change are touching sectors that used to be buffered from that,” McGrath says. “When you don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t have much choice except to experiment.”

McGrath offers three rules for results-driven experimentation:

1. Keep it cheap in the beginning: When some of your experiments fail — which they will — you don’t want to have all your eggs in the same basket. Limit the resources dedicated to any given experiment and focus on variety instead.
2. Don’t sacrifice variety for efficiency: You want to have enough variety to cope with whatever comes your way. McGrath cautions that too many companies lose variety as they become overly focused on efficiency. “A typical company sets up a team with one person in charge, so in effect that’s one experiment,” she says. “If you have 10 little projects with each person looking at a slightly different angle, you’re much more likely to find success.”
3. Design experiments as true experiments, not projects: Companies miss many of the insights that they can gain in experimentation because they are focused on completing a project, McGrath says. To learn, they must design each task as a true experiment.

Read more about Professor McGrath’s insights on the business model concept, published as “Business Models: A Discovery Driven Approach” in Long Range Planning: International Journal of Strategic Management (March 2010).

Photo credit: Flickr/Horia Varlan

	Professor Olivier Toubia, left, and Aliza Freud ’01 collaborated on research.

Key takeaways from the BRITE conference, hosted by the School’s Center for Global Brand Leadership on March 31-April 1, focused on brand strategies for integrating on- and offline communication channels, leveraging communities for problem solving and finding new ways to think about excess capacity. A theme threaded throughout was the growing use of data sets and measurement in the marketing mix. (Read and watch complete audience-generated coverage at the conference’s media hub.)

That theme was explored in a breakout session on April 1, where professors Bernd Schmitt, Oded Netzer, Jonathan Levav and Olivier Toubia along with Aliza Freud ’01 (EMBA) discussed university research collaborations with businesses. The last decade’s boom in data sets — a result of technological innovations — Schmitt said, is one key driver of these collaborations. Toubia and Freud have worked together using data from Freud’s market research firm and online community, SheSpeaks. (Read more about their research in Ideas at Work.)

“Firms have all this data that they don’t necessarily know how to use, and small companies don’t have time to use it,” Levav said. “Our advantage is that we can leverage it into useful information.” He has worked with data from a large German auto manufacturer, for example, to look at decision making in build-to-order transactions.

Yoon Lee, vice president of product innovation at Samsung, presented at the conference and recently collaborated with Schmitt on a forthcoming case study for CaseWorks about the Samsung’s DualView camera and brand leadership. Lee suggested that corporations can have a difficult time getting beyond numbers-led innovation and “don’t know how to express qualitative data.” On the other side, he said, designers are “bad at putting linear arguments on emotional qualities.” Lee suggested that the balance between the technical and emotional qualities is where business school research offers an advantage.

Netzer, who has conducted research on topics as varied as pharmaceutical side effects and alumni giving, added that “cross silo” thinking occurs in the Marketing Division, where computer science, economics, psychology and other disciplines are all in the research mix.  “We are bringing different types of perspectives,” he said, "which helps tremendously with the thinking."

Photo credit: Columbia Business School

How do we make decisions? If you believe classical economic models, decision making is a process of choosing the most rational and self-serving option. But, as Professor Stephan Meier’s research shows, many people’s decisions substantially deviate from this ideal. In fact, some individuals make consistently suboptimal choices, which can have an enormous effect on public policy and corporate strategy.

Meier’s research is focused on behavioral strategy, a subgroup of the growing field of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics marries standard economic theory with research in the field of psychology, often with surprising results.

Fruit or Chocolate?

In a famous experiment from 1998, Daniel Read and Barbara van Leeuwen of Leeds University Business School looked at how well individuals predict hunger and the effect of appetite on making choices. In the study, the researchers asked participants, “Deciding today, would you choose to eat fruit or chocolate next week?” Seventy-four percent of respondents chose fruit for next week. However, when the same respondents were asked about their choice a week later, 70 percent of them now picked chocolate, without regard to what was previously chosen. While this may not seem surprising to any chocolate lover, this effect is called present bias and it reveals an inconsistency in decision making not previously accounted for in economic theory and strategy.

Meier’s current research looks at the effect that present bias has on the financial services industry and the strategies firms can employ to provide benefits to both the nonrational consumer and the firm. In recent papers, he examined the links between present bias and credit card borrowing, showing that the association between higher credit card balances and present-biased individuals is robust — in other words, if you are the type of person who switched from fruit to chocolate, you will be more likely to have more credit card debt.

Capturing Value from Irrational Choices

Traditional for-profit financial services firms have used the irrational tendencies of consumers to their benefit — and even to the consumers’ detriment — which can result in long-term consumer attrition but high short-term profit margins. Meier suggests these firms might instead capitalize on the non-rationality of their consumers by offering products that benefit both parties, both to maintain long-term relationships and attempt to do well by doing good. For example, a firm could create a Christmas club account, which would allow consumers to save money in a non-interest bearing account for a specific purpose, such as the holiday.

Both the banks and the present-biased consumer benefit from this arrangement. Although it may seem like “doing well by doing good” is the social sector’s strength, there is also a lesson here for corporate firms: Think long term when building value for donors and design giving strategies that recognize and allow for nonrational decision making.

Meier encourages firms, both in the public and private sector, to “recognize people may make suboptimal decisions, but they are often systematic about these decisions. Since they are not random, firms can build on these behavioral patterns and predict how consumers may make decisions, designing products that maximize long-term value to the firm, not just squeezing short-term profits.”

This article also appeared in the Social Enterprise Club alumni newsletter. Learn more about the Social Enterprise Club and the Social Enterprise Program.

Photo credit: Flickr/The Consumerist

Google’s rush to push its social media challenger Buzz out the door was an epic public relations fail for the company. With Buzz’s original default settings, e-mail contact lists, Picasa photo uploads and marked Google reader items suddenly became public domain overnight — and users were not happy. In the month since Buzz launched, Google has faced user outrage and has had to update its default settings on the online tool.

Could Google have avoided this? Easily, says Professor Eric Johnson. He says that too often defaults, in this case the privacy settings, are designed and implemented without being considered at the highest level of strategy. What works in engineering lab may not jibe with the marketing strategy.

How Do You Create An Appropriate Default?

Ask your customers.

“If Google had asked their users, they likely would have said ‘Only do that if you ask me first,’” Johnson says. “Google didn’t realize that the defaults they set would be objectionable.”

Johnson suggests that the beta-testing process for a new product should include a survey that asks customers what they prefer. Survey results can help a company design the appropriate default. In the case of Buzz, that might have been what he calls a “forced choice,” which requires customers to make active choices or be denied access to the product. Alternatively, if a firm knows relevant information about a customer’s behavior, interests or profiles, it can create a “smart default,” which generates individualized options that are optimal for both the firm and the customer, says Johnson. The key thing is to design a system that is a win for both parties, not just the firm.

“Create defaults that are appropriate for the customer,” he says.

Read more about Johnson’s research and how to design defaults in “Nudge Your Customers Toward Better Choices” (Harvard Business Review, December 2008).

What Can Online Newspapers Learn from the Airline Industry?
Brett Gordon, Assistant Professor, Marketing

When fuel costs spiked in 2008, none of the large air carriers wanted to be the first to charge for checked baggage. Few had noticed when low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines began charging for the first bag in June 2007. Nearly a year later in May 2008, American Airlines — one of the “majors” — announced that it would charge for the first bag. Before the end of summer, five of the seven largest North American carriers followed suit.

In some ways, the online news industry is facing a similar problem, albeit one without as simple a solution. After months of speculation, the New York Times recently announced that it would implement a new payment system starting in January 2011. Despite a few early chargers (e.g., Wall Street Journal) the vast majority of online news is provided freely to the public. Most newspapers would like to charge, at least partially, for content, but no one wants to be the odd paper out and make the first move. In the academic parlance of game theory this is called a coordination problem, and it occurs repeatedly in countless industries. So how do firms solve this issue?

Members of the airline industry are highly sophisticated at interpreting other airlines strategies. Smaller airlines tend to look to the majors before instituting pricing changes. The large airlines recognize their role and plan accordingly. Online newspapers need to develop a similar ability if the industry is to successfully move to a dual paid/ad-supported revenue model, however, their task is harder in part because the industry is more fragmented.

What Will the Publishing Industry Do Next?
Rita McGrath, Associate Professor, Management

A new development is that the Web itself is starting to splinter. In the early days, you had one way of accessing online content — that was through a computer — and developers could optimize for a certain kind of user experience. Today, people access content in myriad ways that are not always compatible with each other or optimized. A developer or a publisher has to decide whether to hit every platform or optimize for Blackberry, iPad or some other platform. They have to ask, “What is going to be our platform of choice?”

The content business model will be less driven by the need to aggregate the most eyeballs on a common platform, and move towards a model determined by the ecosystem that can draw the most participants. For example, Apple is trying to create a vertically integrated ecosystem with its products and partners. Rival ecosystems will start to compete for business with publishers, and media companies and content providers will watch to see where people are participating.

Publishers will have to come up with ways to monetize their participation in an ecosystem. There is hope that content providers can cut themselves more lucrative deals on these coming platforms.

What Is the Right Price?
Ava Seave, Adjunct Associate Professor, Finance and Economics

It is not unreasonable for companies to charge for information on the Internet. Many try-before-you-buy and sampling schemes are being tested across all types of media. Practically speaking, before companies make decisions about pricing, they should test the proposed pricing models as much as possible before rolling it out.

When the New York Times raised its newsstand and subscription prices in May 2009, they got a good idea of the inelasticity of their consumers’ demand. The move likely emboldened the paper to announce its current scheme. With time before the debut of its pay wall in 2011, the news organization can solicit customer feedback — and handle the blowback.

Every product is different in terms of where the company should put the price. The Times can measure the frequency with which people come back to the site, so it can set the pay wall at the optimal place for maximizing revenue. It is likely that the Times will adjust its online price as needed as its experience with it evolves.

Why did subprime mortgage borrowers make the choices they did, even when in many cases their decisions made them worse off than they were to begin with? To answer this question we need to take a closer look at how people determine what is most in line with their self-interest — and how they fail.

Self-Interest Can Be Led Astray

We continually draw on the process of detecting patterns and making order from chaos when we are trying to figure out which choices are in line with our self-interest. In order to choose effectively, we ask ourselves — consciously or subconsciously — How does it look? We’re usually pretty accurate, but there are some systematic ways in which our ability to determine what’s true might fail us, which can have dire consequences. Our pattern-detection abilities are just as good at finding apparent patterns in purely random events as they are at finding actual patterns. These tendencies can also lead us astray when the true pattern is more complex than we realize.

We also consult our emotions from the very beginning, asking ourselves, How does it feel? We use the information we collected in the former process as a backdrop for assessing our feelings about options confronting us and their potential outcomes, and we make the choice that we feel will have the most positive consequences. But as with pattern detection, there are some systematic ways in which consulting our emotions can lead to error. It’s easier to feel the present consequences of a choice than its future ones, so we give greater weight to the former. However, decisions based on present desires may not be well suited to our modern world, where the ultimate goal is to be as satisfied with the long term as possible.

Buying Into the Illusion

So what kind of patterns and feelings were people detecting when they looked at the costs and benefits of owning a house?

Owning a home had traditionally been seen as a safe investment for the average person, almost guaranteed not to lose value over time. Indeed, the inflation-adjusted average home price had stayed almost constant at $110,000 (in today’s dollars) between the end of World War II and 1997. At that point a new pattern emerged, with prices nearly doubling to about $200,000 between 1997 and 2006 due to a perfect storm of demand-increasing factors: low interest rates, the creation of new financial products based on mortgage income and aggressive lending practices to name just a few. Many local markets grew even faster, especially those in California, New York and Florida.

Seeing this dramatic and consistent growth convinced people that this was a truth about the world — that prices would continue to rise in the future. A nationwide survey conducted by Fannie Mae in 2004 found that 70 percent of Americans considered buying a home to be a safe investment, nearly double the percentage that considered a 401(k) retirement plan to be a safe investment.

Combined with the more immediate and tangible benefits that purchasing a home offers, real estate began to look like an amazing investment. People buying a home to live in for years to come were afraid that if they didn’t act immediately their dream home would become dramatically more expensive, while speculators saw a golden opportunity to get rich quickly. They rushed to enter the market as quickly as possible, driving prices still higher.

But while the upward trend in housing prices could have been consistent with a pattern of constant increases in the future, or moving toward a new and permanently higher plateau, it could have been equally consistent with another pattern that is more variable and difficult to recognize: boom and bust, or a “bubble.” In a bubble situation people feed off one another’s enthusiasm, pushing prices far higher than the true value of the assets in question. Eventually it becomes clear that they’re overvalued, at which point the bubble pops as everyone rushes to sell their assets.

Our pattern-detection abilities and feelings can serve as a powerful source of information about the subtleties and complexities of the world around us, but once we’ve come to see a particular pattern we subconsciously want it to be right. It feels better to think that we’ve unlocked the mysteries of the universe and of the future, and when the pattern promises wealth or other forms of success, as in the case of the subprime market, it’s even more tempting to believe in.

Sheena Iyengar, the S. T. Lee Professor of Business, is the author of The Art of Choosing (Twelve, March 2010), which was published this month. Watch a video interview with Professor Iyengar about the book.

Photo credit: The Truth About Mortgage

On November 18, three student teams gathered at Calder Lounge in Uris Hall to compete in the final round of the First Annual Columbia Business School Corporate Social Responsibility Case Competition sponsored by IBM. The winning team of Elizabeth McCarthy ’11, Blaire Fernandez ’11, Justin Kidwell ’11 and Kristin Stepaniak ’11 were awarded a prize of $1,500.

The case competition was organized in a joint effort by the CSR P2P Group, part of the Social Enterprise Club, and the General Management Association with the support of Columbia CaseWorks. It challenged teams of first- and second-year students to apply concepts and theories to a current challenging CSR issue.

This year’s case was “The Norwegian Government Pension Fund: The Divestiture of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.” written by Andrew Ang, the Ann F. Kaplan Professor of Business. The case considered the exclusion of Wal-Mart from the Norwegian Government Pension Fund’s investment universe and the subsequent divestiture of Wal-Mart by the fund; it looks at the issues socially responsible investing raises for portfolio managers.

The student teams presented their evaluations of the fund’s disinvestment and the judges critiqued them on their innovative approaches. Several proposed solutions emerged in each 10-minute presentation followed by a Q&A session. The panel of judges for the competition included Jennifer Crozier, Director, Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, IBM; Christopher Bishop, IBM; and Professor Ang.

After the students’ presentations, Ang, who has advised the government of Norway on strategic asset allocation for the past four years, expressed his point of view on the case. He has said the country has a history of ethical investing.

“Ethical considerations played an important part in running the fund,” he said. “Norway’s stance on ethical investing comes from the society and they view it as an important issue.” Ang also pointed out that it is not a “static process” but it has evolved and will continue to change in the future.

One of the main issues in the case of Wal-Mart was child labor, said Ang. In the past, the fund has excluded investments in firms that are connected to nuclear weapons and cluster bombs; it also has a history of exclusions based on humanitarian and environmental issues.

This case competition gives Columbia Business School students the unique opportunity to explore CSR topics while learning firsthand what goes into the effective implementations of corporate responsibility policies, and the challenges that companies and advocacies can face in the process. This inaugural competition was truly successful and we hope it has been just the first of many in the years to come!

Photo courtesy of Mara De Monte

In a recent Slate column — with a nod to the upcoming Vancouver Olympics — I describe a study by Dartmouth economist Eric Zitzewitz, who analyzed the sometimes shady world of Olympic figure skating. The figure skating community was shaken by a scandal in the 2002 Salt Lake City Games when a Russian judge, together with a bloc of other judges, allegedly colluded to hand victory to a Russian ice dancing pair over their Canadian competitors.

The International Skating Union responded by changing the way competitions are judged. Today, the scores are reported anonymously and only a subset of those are used in the final judging process. It may seem odd, at first, to expect that by removing direct public scrutiny of individual judges and concealing their identities, it would curtail vote trading. But the idea is that anonymity makes it hard to verify that corrupt judges have actually delivered the scores that they’ve promised — no one can tie any individual judge to a score. It’s hard to collude if you can’t tell whether your partner in crime is keeping up his end of the bargain.

Yet the study finds that these attempts at reducing collusion actually had the opposite effect. While it may have become a bit more difficult for corrupt judges to maintain a collusive arrangement, this effect was overwhelmed by the negative impact of reduced public scrutiny. Zitzewitz found that in the new system, having a home-country judge on the anonymous panel boosted a skater’s score by even more than it did under the earlier regime. (His data did not reveal, however, whether the home-country bias came just from the skater’s countryman, or a cabal of colluding judges — they were anonymous, remember.)

These findings are interesting even if you are not a fan of figure skating or sports in general, as they reveal some of the challenges in designing rules to fight corruption. With the right data we could run a similar type of study for, say, highway procurement contracts in California to analyze whether making bids public decreased corruption — because of greater public scrutiny — or increased it by making collusion among bidders that much easier.

The findings also highlight the unexpected effect of well-intentioned efforts to combat corruption. Anonymity could, in theory, have helped to make figure skating a cleaner sport. In reality, things played out very differently. The lesson, then, is that we should be open to experimenting with different means of keeping competition honest, whether there are highway contracts or gold medals at stake. And we need forensic statisticians with the data to see whether our experiments are successful.

If you have been on Facebook or Twitter in the last 24 hours, you may have seen mobile giving campaigns to aid Haiti. Red Cross and Yéle are among those organizations that have deployed viral giving models in the last 72 hours and have raised millions of dollars in individual donations.

When disaster strikes, charitable giving spikes dramatically. Professor Ray Fisman, director of the School’s Social Enterprise Program, cautions against less-than-honest schemes. Indeed, that has been a historic issue in Haiti. According to the January 13 New York Times op-ed by Tracy Kidder, there are more than 10,000 private organizations in Haiti with a “humanitarian mission” yet the country remains one of the poorest in the world. Fisman says that should not deter giving at the individual level, but rather heightens the importance of donating to well-run and professional aid organizations.

“It’s natural that at a time when an avalanche of cash is being thrown at a problem in a hurry — that’s the nature of disaster relief — opportunistic individuals will take advantage,” he says. “You can protect yourself to a large degree by donating through reputable channels.”

Fisman says a crisis like this also underscores the importance of all CSR policies, not just disaster-specific programs. In recent research on eBay’s GivingWorks program, he and his coreseachers found that following Hurricane Katrina the atmosphere of benevolence had a positive impact and nearly doubled all eBay charity-connected sales.

“At a time of great social need, consumers look very favorably on firms that show a charitable side,” he says. “We also saw this with all the good press that Walmart got for its quick and effective response to Katrina. Of course, companies should also consider helping out in relief efforts for the same reason individuals do — because it’s the right thing to do.”

Photo credit: Red Cross

For many companies, 2009 was not a growth year. For Walmart, however, its revenue grew more than 7 percent from 2008, topping $401 billion.

In the last decade the retailer expanded rapidly in the United States and around the globe. Today it has more than 7,800 locations worldwide. Yet between 1998 and 2005, 65 percent of proposed new stores in the United States that drew protests were never built. That’s a pretty good batting average — for anti-store crusaders. How could the world’s biggest retail chain get derailed by a handful of local activists? It’s part of Walmart’s management strategy, says Professor Paul Ingram.

Building a new retail outlet is not cheap. A store location encompassing tens of thousands of square feet can cost up to $10 million to build. Added to that, the hunt for viable real estate is fraught with uncertainties, particularly when it comes to community support. Ingram says that allowing for a certain number of concessions about location is part of the company’s negotiating process.

Ingram’s research (PDF), which he conducted with Lori Qingyuan Yue of Columbia University and Hayagreeva Rao of Stanford University, provides evidence that Walmart uses low-cost probes, such as filing a building proposal (typically under $15,000), to quietly suss out local support or opposition to a potential new store. Walmart can then withdraw its proposal or rethink its building plan if protests occur. The strategy both limits the company’s expenditure and investment in a new location and minimizes exposure to the news headlines.

“A lot of people make claims on how a corporation should behave,” Ingram says. “Negotiating is part of management. Here is a strategy that accepts concessions as way to manage costs.”

Photo credit: mjb84

Mark Cohen on retail
The luxury bubble will continue to deflate, and only those truly special brands with real brand equity will recover; value players like Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, etc., will see renewed strength. The middle market of poorly differentiated specialty and department stores that lack a clear fashion and value strategy will continue to struggle, and it is unlikely that retail sales will retrace their pre-recession levels until 2011.

Cliff Cramer on the healthcare industry
Consolidation will be a major theme in 2010 as insurers and hospitals seek additional leverage in contract negotiations and pharmaceutical companies explore transformational mergers to broaden product lines, strengthen geographic breadth (emerging markets) and manage earnings in response to major patent expirations in the near term.

Brett Gordon on marketing and technology
Intel will face continued legal pressure from the Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general’s office for its alleged anti-competitive practices despite the $1.25B settlement with AMD in November 2009. Online newspapers and other media outlets will test new revenue generation models in a last ditch attempt to stay afloat. Monetization strategies for online video (e.g., Hulu, YouTube) will get serious attention from firms seeking to lure back advertising dollars with more advanced technology.

Paul Ingram on management
Organizational culture will enjoy a renaissance. Firms will increasingly recognize that shared values can attract and retain employees to the company and that the common orientation of a strong culture allows coordinated responses to unforeseen and emerging challenges. In the next year and beyond, organizations with strong cultures will outperform others, and leaders will focus on building those cultures.

Wei Jiang on the economy
As much as we think that we learned from the crisis, new bubbles are already forming thanks to the easy monetary policies around the world. In particular, the weak dollar has fueled a massive rally in 2009 in a wide range of risky assets — equities, commodities and emerging markets — through carry trades. We are facing the danger of a recurring asset bust in the coming years if and when the dollar reverses.

Jonathan Knee on the media industry
The inexorable fragmentation of media will continue in 2010, Comcast’s acquisition of NBCU notwithstanding. This trend will have no impact, however, on the persistent and irrational fears of regulators, politicians and the public that the global markets for media may fall under the control of a handful of malevolent moguls at any moment.

Homepage photo credit: Bart Hiddink

Creative models for buying and selling goods allow consumers to act philanthropically through charity tie-ins with product purchases. But are they profitable?

New research from Professor Ray Fisman, Dan Elfenbein of Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis, and Brian McManus of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, shows that linking a product with a charity donation is an effective way to boost sales — but not quite enough to make up for the cost in the bottom line.

In the study, Fisman and his academic collaborators worked with Steve Hartman ’07 (EMBA) to assemble data from eBay’s GivingWorks program, where sellers can offer a portion of their auction proceeds to a charity. They found that on average, an item advertised with a 10 percent donation is 20 percent more likely to sell than its non-charity counterpart, and for a price that’s on average 2 percent higher. But these benefits aren’t enough to make up for the cost of the 10 percent donation itself.

The study also showed that inexperienced sellers who lacked a selling track record benefitted from a charity tie-in more than experienced sellers. Fisman suggests that buyers see the charity tie-in as a signal of trustworthiness, which is particularly valuable to a seller that has yet to establish a reputation for reliability. The study also found that following Hurricane Katrina, the impact of charitable giving on sales and price nearly doubled; at a time of national need, benevolence actually became profitable. Fisman also cautions that immediate financial profit is often only part of the overall goal of companies’ giving programs. Good corporate citizens also may bolster their brands over the long-term, and also may contribute to the social good because it’s the right thing to do, whether or not it adds to the bottom line.

This research certainly doesn’t prove that you can’t do well by doing good, or that charity is a “waste” of shareholder dollars. Rather, it highlights the complicated relationship between corporate social responsibility and profits. As business school students and future business practitioners, it’s worth asking how companies can effectively integrate philanthropy and other aspects of CSR into their business models.

Photo courtesy of the Social Enterprise Program