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How Customers Come to Think of a Product as an Extension of Themselves

Harvard Business Review

REI—an outdoor supplies company—sells inexpensive co-op memberships , and members enjoy members-only sales, free classes, even in-store “garage sales” of returned merchandise. Star Wars fans are notorious for their psychological ownership of a film franchise they know intimately.

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Using M&A to Increase Your Capacity for Growth

Harvard Business Review

In today’s fast-changing, unpredictable environments, companies must simultaneously exploit existing profitable business models to run their core business and also explore new products, markets, and models to drive growth. of your market cap to about 25%—Pixar was about 10% of Disney. Recombine to maximize exploration.

Film 8
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Star Wars, Disney, and the Fandom Menace

Harvard Business Review

The latter promptly announced plans to launch a third trilogy of Star Wars films in 2015, a move that will keep the brand alive and serve as a platform for selling products to a new generation of fans. Tapping the market for childhood nostalgia, he once sold a group of 15 action figures still in their original packaging for more than $3,000.

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Is That a TV Show or Are You Trying to Sell Me Something?

Harvard Business Review

But the content people also know their customers will balk if they feel that content has been compromised by paid marketing. Then there was material published by "content marketers" to serve the kinds of information needs typically met by traditional content providers, thus adding value to a customer's engagement with a brand.

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Reinvent Your Company by Reassessing Its Strengths

Harvard Business Review

And the essence of Walt Disney’s original strategy remains intact today: to construct a range of businesses — from animated film to fun parks, TV, retail, cruise ships, and more — around a group of engaging, family-friendly characters. How Samsung Gets Innovations to Market. When Innovation Is Strategy. An HBR Insight Center.

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Blockchain Could Help Artists Profit More from Their Creative Works

Harvard Business Review

home marketers (Fox, HBO), cable and satellite services (Comcast, DirectTV), video syndicators (PMI, TVS), film libraries and archives (Eastman House, Getty Images), and talent agencies (WME, CAA, ICM), each with its own contracts and accounting systems. Consumers can view films on their mobile devices in exchange for bitcoin.

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Linds Redding’s Short Lesson in Perspective

In the CEO Afterlife

Our ad agencies, design groups, film and music studios have gone from being cottage industries and guilds of craftsmen and women, essentially unchanged from the middle-ages, to dark satanic mills of mass production. Economically I probably helped shift some merchandise. At least creatively speaking.