#working knowledge

Research released recently by iseecars.com seems to indicate a fleeting happiness with luxury cars. New buyers of BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche sell them more frequently in the first year than owners of other models. Car owners who drive their vehicles into the ground scoff knowingly: Money can’t buy you a happy ride.

But looking at the statistics more closely reveals a more nuanced reality. The vehicles traded in are often baseline models of those prestige brands, favored more by aspirational buyers than the filthy rich. “Despite the popularity of these vehicles, they generally have below-average reliability ratings from Consumer Reports, which could contribute to why owners get rid of them so quickly,” said iSeeCars CEO Phong Ly, in a statement accompanying the report. Owners of ultra-high-end vehicles, in general, hold on to them.

Branding Sells Cereal, Handbags, and Vacations. Can It Sell a Country?

The 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding last year stirred reflection about the country’s image, values, and position in the world among everyone from former diplomats to Hollywood actors.

Despite efforts to portray Israel as modern and safe, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the country’s complicated history still dominate public consciousness. Memories of failed peace talks tend to loom larger than Israel’s image as a startup nation. Thousands of Instagram posts from Tel Aviv’s gay pride festivities or the buzz from winning the recent Eurovision song contest may not be enough to overcome decades of TV footage of soldiers and tanks that linger in the mind.

To Harvard Business School marketing professor Elie Ofek, it’s more proof that influencing long-held perceptions about a region requires more strategic thinking. After all, it took more than billboards and press junkets to turn Santa Clara County into Silicon Valley.

“Countries are beginning to realize—Israel being one of them—that they need to engage in public diplomacy, not just a foreign diplomacy, and in place branding, not just political advocacy, ” says Ofek, the T.J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of Business Administration. “Part of that is affecting what people in other countries perceive your country to be.”

What does it take to create Denmark’s reputation for modern design or Bali’s Eat Pray Love-style picture of tropical centeredness? Ofek examined the underlying factors behind winning and losing place branding efforts in two recent cases, “The Brand Management of Places” and “Israel at 70: Is it Possible to (re)Brand a Country?”

Entrepreneurs aren’t short on ideas for exciting new products or companies, but they are often short-sighted when it comes to finding ways to fund and build those projects.

“There is a huge amount of discussion about how you come up with a new entrepreneurial possibility, Yelp for dogs or Uber for cats, or whatever,” says Andy Wu, assistant professor of business administration in the Strategy unit of Harvard Business School. “What’s overlooked is a comprehensive framework for how you mobilize the resources—such as financing, employees, and partners—to bring the idea to life.”

Along with colleagues David R. Clough, Tommy Pan Fang, and Balagopal Vissa, Wu recently conducted a review to examine how the entrepreneurial community thinks about acquiring resources, publishing their work in the paper, Turning Lead Into Gold: How Do Entrepreneurs Mobilize Resources to Exploit Opportunities? in the Academy of Management Annals.

Their conclusion: Far too much focus is placed on raising money and signing formal contracts, but far too little attention on informal and non-financial resources that can make or break a new business.

Ignore This Advice at Your Own Peril

Refusing to act on advice from a respected colleague or mentor can backfire and damage your working relationship, a new study says. Hayley Blunden explains the career implications of seeking counsel from others.