Rabikar Chatterjee, Professor of Business Administration and the Katz Faculty Fellow in Marketing, Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh 

 

Title and Abstract:

The Indian Consumer: A case-based discussion

What does the Indian consumer look like? And why is it important to understand the Indian consumer? This session attempts to answer both these questions. The consumer market in India is complex, heterogeneous in the extreme, full of apparent contradictions –- and big. Even as it poses significant challenges, it offers incredible opportunities to any marketer willing to do the homework. The session uses illustrative cases along with qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Indian consumer market to present its salient characteristics and draw lessons for companies wishing to serve this market.

Biographical sketch:

Rabikar Chatterjee is Professor of Business Administration and the Katz Faculty Fellow in Marketing at the University of Pittsburgh. He has previously served on the marketing faculties of Purdue University and the University of Michigan, and has been a Visiting Professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management, Sydney and the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.  Dr. Chatterjee received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, and the equivalent of an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He also has several years of industry experience, in engineering, project management, sales management, marketing, and strategic planning positions.

Dr. Chatterjee’s teaching, research, and consulting interests are in the area of customer-focused marketing and product/service strategies, particularly in high-tech and/or engineered products and services. He currently teaches the core course in Marketing Management and a Product Development and Management elective in both the Katz MBA and Executive MBA programs (both in Pittsburgh and overseas). He has received the Katz Excellence in Teaching Award in recognition of his outstanding teaching in these programs each year from 2001-2 to 2006-7.  He has also taught in a variety of non-degree executive programs at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh, in the United States and overseas.

His research has focused on models of market response to new products, with applications in forecasting, product design, and pricing, and in methods for measuring and representing customers’ perceptions of and preferences for competing products. Dr. Chatterjee’s articles have appeared in various academic journals including the Journal of Marketing Research and Management Science, and Psychometrika. He is an associate editor in the Marketing department of Management Science and a member of the Editorial Board of Marketing Science, two of the leading journals for quantitative research in marketing.  He has also consulted with and offered custom executive training sessions to various companies including DBT, Fiserve, PNC Bank, and US West (now Qwest), and Westinghouse, primarily on product development and management issues.