Nirmalya Kumar: 'An outlier among marketing professors'
Nirmalya Kumar is the latest addition to the group executive council of Tata Sons
 "Nirmalya Kumar: 'An outlier among marketing professors'")
Every two years, the Thinkers 50 publishes what it calls the ‘definitive list of thinkers’. The last one, published in 2011, puts Dr Nirmalya Kumar, Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of Aditya Birla India Centre at London Business School, who is slated to join the Tata Group as a member of its group executive council from August 1, at No 26. Indeed, very few management thinkers anywhere in the world even come close to matching his impeccable credentials.
The London Business Scholl website describes him as “an outlier among marketing professors”, having accomplished the rare feat of publishing six articles each in both the Journal of Marketing Research (the premier journal for marketing academics) and the Harvard Business Review (the premier journal for business practice). His publications have attracted more than 8,000 citations on Google Scholar.
The London Business Scholl website describes him as “an outlier among marketing professors”, having accomplished the rare feat of publishing six articles each in both the Journal of Marketing Research (the premier journal for marketing academics) and the Harvard Business Review (the premier journal for business practice). His publications have attracted more than 8,000 citations on Google Scholar.
In 2010, Speaking.com voted Kumar among the top 5 marketing speakers worldwide; the Economic Times placed him 6th on the list of Global Indian Thought Leaders; and the Economist referred to him as a “rising superstar” in their cover story “The New Masters of Management.”
Kumar has written seven books: Marketing as Strategy (2004), Private Label Strategy (2007), Value Merchants (2007), India’s Global Powerhouses (2009), India Inside (2012) and Brand Breakout (2013). As a consultant, coach, and conference speaker, he has worked with more than 50 Fortune 500 companies in 60 different countries.
Kumar completed 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). He has also taught at Harvard Business School, IMD (Switzerland) and Northwestern University (Kellogg School of Management).
A keen collector of the work of Indian artists, Kumar is said to have the largest known private collection of paintings by Jamini Roy (1887-1972; the father of Indian modern art) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941; the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize).