Faculty and Research

Rohit Deshpandé is Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing and Henry B. Arthur Fellow for Business Ethics at Harvard Business School where he currently teaches in the Owner/President Management Program at HBS and in other executive education programs. He also teaches leadership and corporate accountability in the MBA program and has previously taught global branding, international marketing, and first year marketing in the MBA program as well as a doctoral seminar in marketing management.  He is coordinator for Marketing faculty recruiting and coordinator for Marketing doctoral program admissions and has previously been faculty chair of the Strategic Marketing Management flagship executive program from the Marketing unit of Harvard Business School. 

Deshpandé's primary research interest concerns the creation and implementation of customer-centric corporate culture, a topic on whch he pioneered published work over 15 years ago, well before the term customer-centricity became the strategic focus of leading coporations worldwide. In a series of research papers he has profiled high performance, customer-centric companies in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. He has published several technical aarticles, cases, and monographs and was cited in an American Marketing Association study as one of the most highly published full professors in the marketing field. His most recent books include Developing a Market Orientation, Sage Publications,1999, Using Market Knowledge, Sage Publications, 2001, and The Global Market: Managing the Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization, Jossey-Bass 2004 co-edited with John Quelch.

He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Research, and has also served on the boards of the Journal of International Marketing,the International Journal of Research in Marketing, the Journal of Business Research, and the Asian Journal of Marketing. He is on the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association and on the Executive Directors Council of the Marketing Science Institute. Deshpandé has also been a principal in a marketing research consulting firm and an electronics manufacturing company. He is an elected member of Beta Alpha Phi and Omicron Delta Kappa and is listed in Who's Who in America. He has consulted with and taught executive seminars in a variety of companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia and has received several recognitions for both executive and MBA teaching.

Before coming to Harvard, Professor Deshpandé was the E. B. Osborn Professor of Marketing at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College. He has also held appointments as Associate and Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Texas, Visiting Professor and Scholar at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He served as Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute from 1997-1999. He has a B.Sc. (Hons. Dist.) and M.M.S. from the University of Bombay, an M.B.A. from Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, where he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2008.