Rohit Deshpande

Rohit Deshpandé is Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business Schoolwhere he currently teaches in the Owner/President Management Program and in other executive education offerings. He has also taught global branding, international marketing, and first year marketing in the MBA program as well as a doctoral seminar in marketing management. He is the faculty chair of the Global Colloquium for Participant-Centered Learning and has previously been coordinator for Marketing faculty recruiting, coordinator for Marketing doctoral program admissions, and faculty chair of the Strategic Marketing Management flagship executive program from the Marketing unit of Harvard Business School. In addition to teaching marketing, he was a part of the design and delivery team that created the Leadership and Corporate Accountability MBA required course at HBS focusing on ethics and corporate governance. In 2008-2009 Deshpande was the Henry B. Arthur Fellow for Business Ethics.

Deshpandé introduced the concept of “customer-centricity” at an American Marketing Association meeting talk in 1998. His primary research interest concerns the creation and implementation of customer centric corporate culture, a topic on which he pioneered published work over 15 years ago, well before the term "customer-centricity" became the strategic focus of leading corporations 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 articles, 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, Using Market Knowledge, and The Global Market: Managing the Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization.

He has served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, 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 Executive Directors Council of the Marketing Science Institute and recently served on the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association.

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 organizations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia and has received several recognitions for both executive and MBA teaching.

Before coming to Harvard, 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.