Ajay K. Kohli

His research focuses on customer centricity, sales management, B2B marketing, and brand management.

Dr. Kohli has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Marketing, the premier broad-based academic journal in Marketing. He currently is Associate Editor, Journal of Marketing and Area Editor, International Journal of Research in Marketing.

He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association. He currently serves on the International Advisory Board of BI Norwegian Business School and on the Advisory Boards of the Journal of Marketing and Journal of Sales and Sales Management. 

He has received three honorary doctorates—from BI Norwegian Business School, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland and Corvinus University of Budapest. He is a recipient of IIM Calcutta’s Distinguished Alumnus Award 2017. He is an AMA Fellow, EMAC Fellow, and ISBM Fellow.

Professor Kohli’s research has been cited more than 45,000 times. He is among the 100 most cited authors in a decade in the fields of Business and Economics combined. Two of his articles are among the 10 most cited Journal of Marketing articles in a quarter century. He is listed among the top 0.5% cited authors in two decades in several social and natural sciences combined.  

 Dr. Kohli received the 2017 AMA/McGraw-Hill/Irwin award, widely considered to be the highest career award in Marketing. He is the 33^rd scholar to receive this award since its inception. In 2016 he received the Paul D. Converse award (termed “Marketing Hall of Fame” by Fortune) for his research on market orientation.

He is the first two-time recipient of the Sheth Foundation / Journal of Marketing award for an article’s long-term impact on the field of marketing. He received the Alpha Kappa Psi award (now called MSI/Paul Root award) for the best practice-oriented article in the Journal of Marketing, the Sheth award for his article in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the best paper award from the International Journal of Research in Marketing. He received the ISBM-David T. Wilson-Sheth Foundation award for his article’s long-term impact in B2B marketing.

Professor Kohli has taught at Emory University, Harvard Business School and The University of Texas at Austin. He has also taught at IMD, Switzerland, BI Norwegian Business School, HSN, Norway, University of Muenster, Germany, Singapore Management University, SDA Bocconi, Italy, and WHU, Germany.

He has led numerous executive education seminars in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America.  He has taught at the undergraduate, MBA, EMBA, and Ph.D. levels, and received the Jack G. Taylor Teaching Excellence Award at UT-Austin.

Dr. Kohli has worked in India for the Tata Group and HMM (now GSK). He has worked In the USA as Partner of the Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte). He has consulted with and/or taught at several companies including 3M, Accenture, Andersen, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Eastman Kodak, Halliburton, IBM, Shell, Texas Instruments, and the World Bank.

Professor Kohli served as the founding Associate Dean and Director of the doctoral program in Business at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. In this capacity, he spearheaded the launch of the doctoral program, recruitment of doctoral students, development of operating processes, and ongoing administration.

Dr. Kohli holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, a PGDM (MBA) from IIM Calcutta, and a PhD in Business Management from the University of Pittsburgh.