Professor of Marketing, Director of Centre for Marketing, and Co-Director of the Aditya Birla India Centre at London Business School.

Short biog:

Professor Kumar received his B.Com. from Calcutta University (graduating first in a class of 5,251 students), his MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (scoring a perfect 5.0 grade point average), and his PhD in marketing from Kellogg Graduate School of Management (winning the Marketing Science Institute's Alden G. Clayton Award for his PhD dissertation). Dr. Kumar has:

Taught at Harvard Business School, IMD (Switzerland), and Northwestern University.

Worked with more than 50 Fortune 500 companies in 50 different countries as coach, seminar leader and speaker on strategy, marketing, branding, retailing and distribution.

Served on the board of directors of ACC, Ambuja Cements, Bata India, BP Ergo, Defaqto and Zensar Technologies.

Made more than 300 press appearances including BBC, Business Week, CNBC, CNN, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and Wall Street Journal.

Authored, Global Marketing (BusinessWorld) as well as Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO’s Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation, Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge (with J-B. Steenkamp) and Value Merchants: Demonstrating and Documenting Superior Value in Business Markets (with J. Anderson and J. Narus), India’s Global Powerhouses: How they are taking on the World, all published by Harvard Business School Press.

Written more than 40 cases and teaching notes including Amazon, Red Bull, Zara, and Wal-Mart. Winner of three Business Week/ECCH awards for most adopted cases.

Published four articles for the Harvard Business Review, most recently Strategies to Fight Low-Cost Rivals. Academic papers have appeared in Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Marketing, as well as six articles in the Journal of Marketing Research. These articles have received more than 1500 citations.

Won several teaching honors, including being recognized with Business Week's highest four-star faculty rating in their 1993 guide to MBA programs.
 
Extended biog:

Nirmalya Kumar is Professor of Marketing, Director of Centre for Marketing, and Co-Director for Aditya V. Birla India Centre at London Business School. Previously, he has taught at Harvard Business School, IMD, and Northwestern University.

Nirmalya is passionate about marketing and willing to espouse controversial positions. He believes that the marketing function is currently in crisis.

Marketing is caught in the whirlpool of corporate obscurity that comes with responsibility for tactical implementation issues. Instead, for marketing to be relevant to CEOs, it must become strategic, cross-functional, and bottom-line oriented.

As coach, consultant, seminar leader and speaker on strategy, marketing, retailing and distribution, Professor Kumar's experience includes working with almost 50 Fortune 500 companies (e.g., Akzo-Nobel, IBM, Sara Lee) in 40 different countries. He serves on the board of directors of Bata India and Zensar Technologies.

As a teacher, Nirmalya has his own unique philosophy and style. Using his dynamic personality and high energy, Nirmalya believes in provoking debate, confronting and challenging established participant beliefs, and delivering content based on research.

Nirmalya’s book entitled, Marketing As Strategy: The CEO's Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation, was published by Harvard Business School Press in early 2004. Amazon, Wal-Mart, and the award winning easyJet, are among the 35 cases and teaching notes authored by him.  He has also written several influential practitioner articles for Financial Times and the Harvard Business Review. Research oriented publications have appeared in leading academic journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Marketing, as well as six articles in the Journal of Marketing Research.

Professor Kumar received his B.Com. from Calcutta University (graduating first in a class of 5,251 students), his MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (scoring a perfect 5.0 grade point average), and his PhD in marketing from Kellogg Graduate School of Management (winning the Marketing Science Institute's Alden G. Clayton Award for his PhD dissertation).  His teaching skills were recognized with Business Week's highest four-star rating in their 1993 guide to MBA programs.

Topics in more detail:

1.Romacing the Brand
- "Don't Advertise the Brand live it"
•    Brand Image
•    Branding Strategies
•    Brand Extensions/Deletions
2. Serving the luxury goods customer
•    Emotional Brand Image
•    Buzz Marketing
•    Service Excellence
3. Pricing to Capture Value - "There are two fools in each market. - One charges too little; the other charges too much"
•    Assessing Customer Value
•    Skimming vs. Penetration Strategies
•    Conjoint Analysis
4. Delighting Customers with Service - "Complainers are the Company's best friends"
•    Understanding service gaps
•    Customer satisfaction measurement
•    Customer complaints for profit
5. Competing with and against Retailer Brands
•    When Retailer Brands succeed
•    Competing through Price Promotions
•    Managing dual value chains
6. From Free to Paid Services
•    Getting Customers to valuse free services
•    Naked Solutions with options
7. Creating Customer Value in Business Markets - "Competeing on price, where's the fun in that"
•    Customer Profitability
•    Assessing Customer Value
•    Customer Acitivty Cycle
8. Creative Segmentation & Positioning Strategies - "If you went out of business, would anyone miss you"
•    Strategic versus Market Segments
•    Targeting
•    Positioning
9. Win-Win Distribution Partnerships
•    Developing Channel Trust
•    Understanding Channel Power
•    Fairness and Equity
10. From Market Driven to Market Driving - "Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy"
•    Why satisfied customers
•    Incremental defect and Radical Innovation
•    Unleashing organizations creativity
11. Designing Distribution Systems - "Can we make the process of acquiring our products easy and fun"
•    Service Outputs
•    Channels Compensation
•    Marketing Flows
12. Distribution Strategy Audit
•    Identifying Channel opportunities
•    Resource allocation
•    Bench marking distribution
13. Marketing: The Challenge of Change - "Markets change faster than marketing"
•    The 4Ps trap
•    Marketing Manifesto
•    The Marketing Mindset
14. International Distribution Strategies
•    Gray Markets
•    Entry modes
•    Selecting distributors
15. Internet Distribution Strategies - "Radical new distribution channels always change the nature of the product they are distributing"
•    Channel conflict
•    Dell versus Compaq
•    Disintermedication
16. Lessons from the Bleeding Edge of e-Commerce - "It is easier to push a mouse than a shopping cart"
•    Customer Lifetime Value
•    Online Shopping behaviour
•    Fulfulment Models
17. Wal-Mart - "The lion and the lamb may sleep together, but the lamb shall not get much sleep"
•    Becoming the largest retailer
•    Gross margin analysis
•    International Expansion
18. Customer Loyalty - "Customers seek value, not relationships"
•    Satisfaction versus Loyalty
•    Loyalty versus Value
•    Why Loyalty matters

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