Kasturi V. Rangan
Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing, Harvard Business School, USA,
Co-Chair Social Enterprise Initiative, Harvard Business School, USA
Main Topics:
- Business marketing
- Channels of distribution
- Customer relationship management
- Marketing
- Non profit
- Conflict management
- Corporate social responsibility
- Customer behaviour
- Customer profitability analysis
- High-tech marketing
- Service management
- Social enterprise
- Strategy
Research Focus:
Channel Stewardship ( Prof Rangan has developed a paradigm for continuously evolving a firm’s Go-to-Market strategy in keeping up with the changes in business environment. This evolutionary concept is a break from existing approaches to Channel Strategy);
Social Marketing (Prof. Rangan is studying the role of marketing in influencing social change by focusing on the adoption of social products and ideas such as family planning, economic development, drug abuse prevention, health care, and recycling).
Professional Profile:
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), and a faculty director of the School’s Research Division (2004-2009), 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 (as its course 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 Prof. Rangan teaches the elective MBA courses: Commerce and Society: How Business can Integrate Economic and Social Value and, Business Approaches and Solutions to Base-of-the-Pyramid. In addition, he teaches in a number of focused executive programs, including the three he created: Business Marketing Strategy, Strategic Perspectives on Nonprofit Management, and Corporate Social Responsibility.
Professor Rangan’s Business Marketing and Channel Strategy research have 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. Prof. Rangan has served on the editorial board of Journal of Retailing and 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 the challenges of nonprofit management. 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 two topics: One to understand the needs and wants of the global poor, those living on less than /day. The aim of the research is to capture the lessons of successful models of businesses, nonprofits and governments serving that segment. His second stream of research focuses on how to improve the practice of “corporate social responsibility.”
Before he joined the Ph.D program at Northwestern University, Prof. Rangan held several sales and marketing positions for a large multinational company in India for over six years. Prof. Rangan has engaged in a variety of executive education programs, consultancies, and advisory activities for numerous commercial and nonprofit enterprises. Prof. Rangan has been on the faculty of the Harvard Business School since 1983.
Selected Works:
Prof.Rangan has co-authored several books, which include:
- Going to Market, which deals with distribution systems for industrial products and Business Marketing Strategy, which presents approaches for managing industrial products and markets over their life cycle.
- Rangan’s latest book, Transforming Your Go-to-Market Strategy, presents a unique three step framework on how to evolve and steward a firm’s go-to-market strategy.
Associated Partner
Associated Partner
