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Global Marketing Expert, Harvard Professor Inspired by His PhD from Pitt
As Rohit Deshpandé was earning his doctorate from the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, Pittsburgh was transforming itself from a Rust Belt icon to a Renaissance city-a fitting backdrop for the education of a man who would go on to study marketing in emerging economies.
"It provided me with a foundation for not just a career but for a life," says Deshpandé, the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing and Henry B. Arthur Fellow for Business Ethics at Harvard Business School. "The inspiration that I got [at Pitt] during my PhD education is that it's about a lifelong love of learning."
After earning his MBA from North-western University, Deshpandé, who was named one of the Katz School's distinguished alumni in 2008, went back to his native India to work in industry. A part-time teaching stint at what was then the University of Bombay made him realize that academia was where he wanted to build his career. He wrote to one of his MBA professors for advice, and that advice led him to the University of Pittsburgh to work with then Albert Wesley Frey Professor of Marketing Gerald Zaltman.
"A PhD program is much more like an apprenticeship, rather than like a traditional, formal graduate education," explains Deshpandé. "The person you work with teaches you the craft of research."
He arrived at a time when Pittsburgh, which was emerging from an economic recession, was rebuilding its downtown as well as its image as the "City of Champions," home in that time to national trophies from Pitt football, the Steelers, and the Pirates.
"There was a can-do attitude about the city, which was very inspiring," notes Deshpandé, who earned his PhD from the Katz School in 1979. "It was a wonderful time to be in Pittsburgh."
His research interests focus on global marketing strategy, a discipline that has assumed a new importance as the nation's economy becomes more heavily influenced by the rest of the world. Deshpandé believes business schools, which tend to study Western companies and their methods of marketing products and services, take a very U.S./Euro-centric approach.
"I think the future belongs to companies and to thought leaders from emergent economies," he says, particularly those in the "BRIC" group-Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
He cites the examples of Embraer S.A., the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer that makes most of JetBlue Airways' fleet; Russian Standard, a company that makes ultra-premium vodka as well as offers financial services; and Tata Sons Ltd., the Indian company that recently acquired both Tetley USA Inc. and Jaguar Cars Limited.
"These are companies that most of us are just beginning to learn about, but I think they are the potential marketing powerhouses of the future," Deshpandé says. And while business schools are intellectually up to the challenge of teaching a more globalized approach, "we still tend to think of the best marketing practices as coming from home, and that just ain't so."
In addition to his academic research, Deshpandé also has served as a principal in a marketing research consulting firm and an electronics manufacturing company. He believes that field work should infuse all aspects of a business school education, particularly in case study research.
"I think of business schools as being closer to schools of engineering than to colleges of arts and sciences," he says. "We're very engaged with problems of practice, and the work that we do, ideally, is an extension of the problems of practice."
He summarizes his experience at the Katz School with an acronym that spells Pitt: people, inspiration, trust, and thankfulness. At Pitt, "there was not this sense of professor and student so much as a senior colleague and a junior colleague," he says. "I have learned that the best results come when students are coached rather than taught."