Sridhar Balasubramanian

Sridhar Balasubramanian is associate dean of both the full-time MBA Program and the online MBA@UNC Program, and a professor of marketing.

His teaching and research interests are in marketing strategy and technology strategy, customer-focus, innovation and growth strategy, services design and marketing, e-business, customer relationship management, game theory, and the management of competition. He also specializes in bringing the tools and concepts of market-focus and customer-focus into other functional areas, including the management of the human resource function.

He has been a keynote speaker at national conferences on the topics of developing a customer- and market-focus, and customer-focused innovation and growth.

Dr. Balasubramanian has been recognized for his pioneering research on how the Internet and mobile channels are reshaping the worlds of business and marketing. His research has won prestigious awards from organizations such as INFORMS and the National Science Foundation (NSF), including the John D.C. Little Award from INFORMS for the best marketing paper in Marketing Science and Management Science.

He pursues a broad and interdisciplinary research agenda, and has worked with researchers across functional areas including operations, IT and management/strategy. His research has been cited over 1,160 times on the Social Science Citation Index, and over 4,250 times on the Google Scholar Citation Index. It appears in journals such as Marketing Science, Management Science, Manufacturing & Services Operations Management, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Retailing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Decision Support Systems, and Sloan Management Review. He has served as guest editor of the centennial issue of the Journal of Retailing, a reviewer for numerous journals, and on the editorial board of Marketing Science and the Journal of Interactive Marketing.

Poets & Quants named Dr. Balasubramanian "one of the Top 50 Business Professors in the World" and he is frequently honored for outstanding teaching. UNC designated him as a "MBA Master Teacher at UNC," and he won the Weatherspoon Award for Excellence in PhD Teaching, the UNC Kenan-Flagler Executive Development “Above and Beyond” Award, and is a six-time winner of the Best Teacher award in Executive MBA Programs.

Dr. Balasubramanian works actively with the corporate world. He has conducted executive development programs for and/or consulted with numerous organizations in the United States, Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America, including AEROTEK, the Asahi Glass Company, Babcock & Wilcox, BASF, Boeing, Canara Bank, Caterpillar Inc., CISCO, Dentsply, Environmental Protection Agency, Glen Raven, Grant Thornton, Ingersoll-Rand, KPMG, LOWE’S, Performance Food Group, SHRM, State Bank of Hyderabad, Telkom, Union Bank of India, the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Vincera and Xerox.

Before beginning his academic career, he was area sales manager for India’s leading food manufacturing and marketing company. He has advised start-ups and existing firms on issues related to becoming customer focused, the design and implementation of marketing strategy, building creative thinking and innovation skills, and the pursuit of profitable innovation and growth.

He received his PhD and MA from Yale University, his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM Bangalore-India) and his B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kharagpur-India).