Prof. SURESH RAMANATHAN

Professor of Marketing at Texas A&M University

PhD, Marketing, New York University – Leonard N. Stern School of Business (1997 – 2002)

MBA, Marketing, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (1985 – 1987)

B.Tech, Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (1981 – 1985)

Prof. Suresh Ramanathan is Professor of Marketing at the Mays School of Business, Texas A&M University, USA. He is a leading Ramanathan scholar in marketing, specialized in the dynamics of affective and motivational processes in customer judgment and choice. Drawing on his rich experience in the advertising industry and his research on consumer emotions and social in uence, he will provide an in-depth understanding of what works and what does not work in creating, sustaining and managing engagement. Ramanathan began his career in marketing as an area sales manager in Bangalore, India, where he worked for Brooke Bond Lipton, a division of Unilever. He then became an associate media director at J. Walter Thompson in Bangalore/Madras and media director at Lowe Lintas before moving to Delhi to work as national media research director for McCann-Erickson.

This is a hyper-competitive world. Companies are fighting to stay relevant in the eyes of their customers and maintain differentiation while every move of theirs is copied, and every attempt to become more efficient is benchmarked by others. Meanwhile, companies pat themselves on their back with awed metrics such as customer satisfaction scores, not realizing that satisfaction is a static measure that does not capture the nuances of people’s true and evolving feelings towards the brand.

This seminar will provide some food for thought to mid and senior level executives mulling over the vexatious problem of maintaining market share in a context of high competition. It will challenge executives to think about how to design superior customer experiences at every touch point, be it in-store, online, mobile media, customer service lines, brochures, or traditional media, just to name a few. Differentiation is not merely about creating innovative products or communicating a distinctive positioning. It is about creating a reinforcing set of experiential activities that create a strong network effect that cannot be replicated in toto by others.

This workshop will take a deep dive into using customer experiences as a means of building a strong defense against competition and creating a strong feeling towards the brand that transcends the transactional and momentary measure of satisfaction.