Rohit Deshpande

Rohit Deshpande

Baker Foundation Professor
Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing, Emeritus

Baker Foundation Professor
Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing, Emeritus

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Rohit Deshpande
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Featured Work Publications Research Summary

Cases and Teaching Materials
Cases and Teaching Materials

Books
Books

Journal Articles
Journal Articles

Book Chapters
Book Chapters

  • Deshpandé, Rohit, and Zoe Chance. "Fighting AIDS, Fighting Poverty: Customer Centric Marketing in the Generic Antiretroviral Business." In Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and Economic Value, edited by V. Kasturi Rangan, John A. Quelch, Gustavo Herrero, and Brooke Barton. John Wiley & Sons, 2007. View Details
  • Deshpande, R., and J. U. Farley. "Reliability in Measuring Market Orientation and Financial Performance in Transition Economies." In Marketing Issues in Transnational Economies, edited by R. Batra, 127–138. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. View Details

Other Publications and Materials
Other Publications and Materials

All Publications

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 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 "Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship." 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. 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", winner two Silver Telly Awards).

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, the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, the Harvard Murthy Classical Library of India Committee, and is on the advisory boards of the American Repertory Theater and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. 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.

Featured Work
The Ordinary Heroes of the Taj Hotel
On the 26th of November 2008, a group of terrorists struck a dozen targets in Mumbai, India including the iconic, 103-year old Taj Palace Hotel. The siege at the hotel  lasted two days and three nights and was covered extensively by international media. But there is an amazing, inspirational back story about the heroic actions of the Taj staff couched in the culture of the Taj Hotels company. What can the staff, who saved lives while endangering their own, teach American companies about ethical behavior?

Provenance Paradox and Country of Origin Branding
Since a product's country of origin of the product establishes its authenticity, companies from emerging markets are unable to price products comparably to similar firms from developed markets. This problem of establishing authenticity, called the "provenance paradox," represents the biggest marketing challenge for emerging markets in the next decade, as companies in emerging markets try to compete in product categories for which their countries are not known.
A Global Leader's Guide to Managing Business Conduct

Managers working outside their home environments often find that their companies’ norms are inconsistent with practices followed by other businesses in the area. In response, many follow the time-honored advice given in the fourth century by the bishop of Milan to Augustine of Hippo: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

National Customer Orientation: An Empirical Test across 112 Countries
Customer orientation is a central tenet of marketing. However, less is known about how customer orientation varies across countries and time.  Mintz, Currim, and Deshpandé (Eur. J. Mark., 56: 1014–1041, 2022) propose a country-level construct, national customer orientation, and develop theoretical propositions on how a country’s wealth and average customer price sensitivity afect national customer orientation during and after global economic shocks without providing an empirical test. This paper tests drivers of national customer orientation by employing World Economic Forum and World Bank annual panel data from 112 countries between 2007 and 2017. The results show that customer orientation is a greater luxury of richer nations and price sensitivity is a partial mediator of that relationship; however, both relationships only transpire in non-recessionary times. The empirical test furthers scholarly research on national customer orientation and provides managers with country-level customer orientation benchmarks across countries and time.
Cases and Teaching Materials
Books
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
  • Deshpandé, Rohit, and Zoe Chance. "Fighting AIDS, Fighting Poverty: Customer Centric Marketing in the Generic Antiretroviral Business." In Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and Economic Value, edited by V. Kasturi Rangan, John A. Quelch, Gustavo Herrero, and Brooke Barton. John Wiley & Sons, 2007. View Details
  • Deshpande, R., and J. U. Farley. "Reliability in Measuring Market Orientation and Financial Performance in Transition Economies." In Marketing Issues in Transnational Economies, edited by R. Batra, 127–138. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. View Details
Other Publications and Materials
Research Summary
Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy
Rohit Deshpandé's research program focuses on Customer-Centricity. A stream of projects examines the interaction between corporate and national culture as they influence the development and implementation of global marketing strategies in high performance firms. This research also develops diagnostics for measuring the customer-centricity/market orientation of a firm.

Recent work involves developing case studies of customer-centric firms in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Cultural Entrepreneurship and the Business of the Arts
A more recent research program focuses on creating and managing ventures connected with the arts and culture. This research extends the concept of Customer-Centricity into the context of Audience Engagement. This primarily case-based work explores how successful arts/culture organizations deal with challenges of changing audience demographics and social media marketing. And how new arts/culture startups engage with new audiences.
Workplace Ethics and Global Business Standards
This research grows out of initial collaborative research with Joshua Margolis and Lynn Paine on the relationship between codes of conduct and corporate performance. This work was reported in Harvard Business Review articles in 2005 and 2011. More recent research focuses on specific topics in workplace ethics including consumer moral disengagement regarding workplace conditions, consumer reactions to employee pay inequalities, and the marketing of skin whitening cosmetics.
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