Strategy

When carefully planned, language can be a strategic tool for managing a brand’s communication to target customers and for building brand equity. This paper explains how and why managers should conduct a brand language audit -- a comprehensive inventory of the many and varied linguistic devices used by brands in the category -- and then use the findings from the audit to develop a brand language brief. The brand language brief is a blueprint for crafting a distinctive language for a brand.

As a result of the digital revolution, new topics and themes have entered consumer research, and, as the digital revolution enters a new phase, additional new concepts and research questions will emerge. To illustrate the variety of themes on digital technology that consumer researchers have studied, I am presenting a collection of five articles that represent this active new research area. Moreover, I will look into the future and propose a research agenda to address key consumer behavior issues occurring during the next phase of the digital transformation.

What does it take for success in the media business? Creativity, innovation, and performance, of course. Plus experience and good judgment. However, it also requires an understanding of the principles and tools of management. This book summarizes the major dimensions of a business school curriculum and applies them to the entire media, media-tech, and digital sectors. Its chapters cover—in a jargonless, non-technical way—the major management functions.

Being a successful manager or entrepreneur in the media and digital sector requires creativity, innovation, and performance. It also requires an understanding of the principles and tools of management. Aimed at the college market, this book is a short, foundational volume on media management. It summarizes the major dimensions of a business school curriculum and applies them to the entire media, media-tech, and digital sector. Its chapters cover—in a jargonless, non-technical way—the major functions of management.

In this article, we provide a descriptive account of how people from different generations vary in their use of financial management technology, their access credit markets, and how they finance consumption and incur financial costs and penalties. We use a detailed panel of transaction-level data from Iceland on individual spending, incomes, balances, and credit limits from a personal financial management software. We find that technology adoption is faster for millennials, but use of consumer credit and financial penalties are higher for older generations.

Shadow bank market share in residential mortgage origination nearly doubled from 2007 to 2015, with particularly dramatic growth among online "fintech" lenders. We study how two forces, regulatory differences and technological advantages, contributed to this growth.

The problem of optimally designing information for multiple agents who interact in a game can be formulated as a linear program. We explore its dual representation and show that it provides a novel perspective and new economic insights into the information-design problem. Through the lens of the dual, we identify general properties that hold for all information-design problems. Duality also offers a portable, general, method for computing solutions. We illustrate this approach in the context of simple investment games.

This paper studies how hedge fund activism impacts corporate innovation. Firms targeted by activists improve their innovation efficiency over the five-year period following hedge fund intervention. Despite a tightening in research and development (R&D) expenditures, target firms increase innovation output, as measured by both patent counts and citations, with stronger effects among firms with more diversified innovation portfolios. Reallocation of innovative resources, redeployment of human capital, and change to board-level expertise all contribute to improve target firms' innovation.