Rohit Deshpande

Rohit Deshpandé is a Baker Foundation Professor and Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing, Emeritus at Harvard Business School, where he has been teaching in the Advanced Management Program, the General Management Program, the Program for Leadership Development, the Owner/President Management Program and in other executive education offerings. He is currently co-teaching a MBA field/project-based course "Business of the Arts." 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  executive program at Harvard Business School. He is also the faculty chair for Harvard Business School South Asia research. In addition to teaching marketing, he was a part of the design and delivery team that created the Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA) MBA required course at HBS focusing on ethics and corporate governance and was faculty chair of the LCA in India executive program. In 2008-2009 Deshpande was recognized as the Henry B. Arthur Fellow for Business Ethics and in 2015 received the Robert F. Greenhill award for outstanding contributions to the HBS community. Most recently his case studies on "Terror at the Taj" and "Street Symphony" have won Silver Telly Awards and his co-authored paper "Consumers avoid buying from firms with higher CEO-to-worker pay ratios" won the 2021 Journal of Consumer Psychology Park Best Paper Award.

Deshpandé introduced the concept of “customer-centricity” at an American Marketing Association meeting talk in 1998 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 discipline. His recent work on this topic is published in the “Core Readings in Marketing Series: Customer Centricity.” He is now extending Customer-Centricity into Audience Engagement in arts and culture organizations with case studies on the marketing of jazz (“Wynton Marsalis & Jazz at Lincoln Center”), theater (“American Repertory Theater”), media/entertainment (“Tyra Banks: Personal Branding”), art ("The Louvre"), and classical music ("The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra: Cultural Entrepreneurship", "Yo-Yo Ma and Silk Road" and "Street Symphony").

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 has 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 has been 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. At Harvard, he serves on the Harvard University Committee on the Arts and is on the advisory board of the American Repertory Theater. He is also on the Board of Directors of Silk Road, founded by Yo-Yo Ma. 

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 at Austin, 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 University. 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.