V. Kasturi Rangan

Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing
Harvard Business School

Kash Rangan is the Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing at the Harvard Business School. Formerly 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 course, 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 or co-authored several books, which include: 1) Going to Market, which deals with distribution systems for industrial products, and 2) 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 framework on how to evolve a firm’s go-to-market strategy with the changing  market needs. In the book Rangan develops the concept of Channel Stewardship and  three disciplines of how to implement it in practice.

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  founded the executive program, Strategic Perspectives on Nonprofit Management, which he continues to teach in. His current research is focused on understanding  business models that address the needs and wants of  4.2 billion people living on less than $5/day. The aim of the research is to develop models of success that bring value to the base-of-the pyramid and yet are profitable and sustainable in the long run.

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.