Faculty and Research

Kash Rangan is the Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing at the Harvard Business School. Until recently the chairman of the Marketing Department (1998-2002), he is now the co-chairman of the school's Social Enterprise Initiative. He has taught in a wide variety of MBA courses, including the core First-Year Marketing course (was its head across multiple sections from 1993-1996), and the second-year electives, Business Marketing and Channels-to-Market. He has also taught marketing in the Advanced Management Program for senior managers. Currently Rangan teaches the elective courses, Customers, Commerce and Society: Business Value and the Private Creation of Social Value, and Business at the Base of the Pyramid. In addition, he teaches in a number of focused executive education programs: Business-to-Business Marketing Strategy, Strategic Perspectives on Nonprofit Management, and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Professor Rangan's business marketing and channels research has appeared in management journals such as Journal of Marketing, Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Sloan Management Review, Journal of Retailing, Management Science, Marketing Science and Organization Science. Rangan has authored several books, which include: 1) Going to Market, which deals with distribution systems for industrial products (co-authored with E. Raymond Corey and Frank V. Cespedes), and 2) Business Marketing Strategy, which presents approaches for managing industrial products and markets over their life cycle (co-authored with Benson P. Shapiro and Rowland T. Moriarty). Rangan's latest book, Transforming Your Go-to-Market Strategy, presents a unique framework on how to evolve a firm's go-to-market strategy with the changing needs of customers, and other opportunities in the environment. Rangan currently serves on the editorial board of Journal of Retailing and Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing. He has also served on the editorial board of Journal of Marketing.

In addition to his interest in business marketing, Professor Rangan is actively involved in studying the role of marketing in nonprofit organizations, and specifically how it influences the adoption of social products and ideas. He has written a number of case studies and articles on the topic. He served as one of the founding co-chairs of the Social Enterprise Initiative at Harvard, whose faculty study and teach the challenges of nonprofit management. He also founded and chaired the executive program, Strategic Perspectives on Nonprofit Management, from 1994 until 1998. His research on this topic has appeared in journals that include Nonprofit Management and Leadership and Harvard Business Review. His current research is focused on understanding the needs and wants of the global poor, those living on less than $5/day. The aim of the research is to capture the lessons of successful models of businesses, nonprofits and governments serving that segment.

Rangan has a Bachelor of Technology from I.I.T. (Madras), 1971; an MBA from I.I.M. (Ahmedabad), 1973; and a Ph.D. in marketing from Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois), 1983. From 1973 to 1979, Rangan held several sales and marketing positions for a large multinational company in India. Rangan has engaged in a variety of executive education programs, consultancies, and advisory activities for numerous commercial and nonprofit enterprises.

Rangan has been on the faculty of the Harvard Business School since 1983.