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Dr. Nirmalya Kumar - Speaker Profile

Nirmalya Kumar is the Lee Kong Chian Professor of Marketing at Singapore Management University and Distinguished Fellow at INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute.

Previusly, heading strategy as member of the Group Executive Council of Tata Sons, he reported to Cyrus P. Mistry, the Chairman for the 100 billion dollar Tata Group with over 650,000 employees worldwide.
Nirmalya was professor of marketing and director of Aditya Birla India Centre at the London Business School, besides having taught at Columbia University, Harvard Business School, IMD (Switzerland) and Northwestern University (Kellogg School of Management).

As a consultant and coach, Nirmalya has worked with more than 50 Fortune 500 companies in 60 different countries. He has served on several boards of directors, including ACC, Bata India, Tata Chemicals, UltraTech Cement and Zensar.

As an author, his eight books include Marketing as Strategy, Private Label Strategy, Value Merchants and Brand Breakout. Thinking Smart: How to Master Work, Life and Everything In-Between by Harper Collins is the latest. He has nine appearances in Harvard Business Review and several articles in leading academic journals. These publications have attracted over 19,000 citations on Google Scholar.

Nirmalya is one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy and marketing. He was thrice included in Thinkers50 (the biannual listing of the top 50 management thinkers in the world) before being inducted into their Hall of Fame in 2017 for his lifetime contributions to management thought leadership. In 2011, he had also received their “Global Village Award” for the person who contributed the most to the business community’s understanding of globalisation and the new frontiers established by emerging markets. Over the years, he has been included in 50 Best B-school Professors (Poets & Quants) and 50 Most Influential Business School Professors (mbarankings.com).

Nirmalya received his Bachelor in Commerce degree from Calcutta University, his Master in Business Administration degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago and his Doctoral Degree in marketing from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Passionate about art, he supports exhibitions and publications through his Indian art collection. In 2013, he was recognized for his efforts on behalf of South Asian art with an Honorary Fellowship by SOAS University of London.

Suggested Keynote Speeches & Programs

Areas of Expertise :

Strategy and Organisation
- Corporate Strategy
- Competitive Strategy
Marketing
- Marketing Strategy
- Brand Strategy
- Retail Operations and Strategy
- Financial Impact and Marketing
Asian & ASEAN Initiatives
Business Models and Innovation

Customer Value Management
Today, marketers in Business Markets face tremendous price pressure from customers. The presentation will outline how to meet this challenge using an customer value management approach, based on a forthcoming book entitled Rare Commodity: Moving Business Markets Beyond Price to Value by Professors James Anderson, Nirmalya Kumar, and Jim Narus. The central argument will be that only by demonstrating and documenting value to customers, can firms be successful in business markets. Key points:

Creating customer value
Capturing the value of supplementary services
Designing attractive market offers
Pricing for profit

Getting Closer to the Customer
Increasingly, companies are serving multinational customers who are demanding in terms of service and prices. These customers expect a high level of service delivery across multiple, globally distributed, locations. Customer delight and customer retention are the key to success especially in the face of aggressive, lower priced competitors seeking to pry the account open. Companies are challenged to provide value added solutions to customers rather than simply selling products. The session will use the Tetra Pak case to highlight how a company embarked on a journey to get closer to its major key customers by providing solutions and increasing customer satisfaction. Key Points:

How to get closer to customers
From selling products to providing solutions
Managing customer satisfaction initiatives
Successful key account management

Building a Culture of Innovation: The IDEO Way
The session will examine how IDEO, a design firm, has built a culture of innovation to develop creative new products. A 20-minute video presentation will be followed by a discussion of how competences, processes, structure, people, and assets can help generate a culture capable of producing repeated innovation.

Building Killer Brands
The session will use the Black & Decker case to highlight the essence of successful brand marketing strategies. The case examines how to compete against an industry leader. The presentation will focus on the challenge of building killer brand strategies. Key Points:

How to develop a killer brand
Differentiating the brand from competitors
Overtaking industry leaders
Brand portfolio management

Marketing Innovation
The session will examine innovation from a marketing perspective. The presentation will use examples and videos from consumer products (e.g., Sony), services (e.g., easyJet), and business marketing (e.g., Dow Corning). Key points:

Marketing as a driver of innovation
Creating breakthrough customer value
Being market driving rather than market driven

From Market-Driven to Market-Driving
The session is based on the article by the same title co-authored with Lisa Scheer and Philip Kotler. It will examine the difference between incremental and radical innovation. How to create breakthrough customer value by being ahead of the customer? How to create radical innovation in established firms? The presentation will use examples and videos from consumer products (e.g., Sony), services (e.g., Zara, easyJet), and business marketing (e.g., Dow Corning). Key points:

Radical innovation in established firms
Creating breakthrough customer value
Being market driving rather than market driven

From One Store to Global Dominance in 40 years
Firms today face the challenge of growth and profitability, especially in the face of emerging low-cost business models (e.g., Aldi, Dell, Huawei, IKEA, Southwest). Understanding the key success factors behind these low cost business models as well as how they operate and grow is critical, regardless of whether one wishes to join them or beat them. The session will use the Wal-Mart case to demonstrate how the company went from a single store in 1962 to the largest company in the world in 2002. A comprehensive approach will be adopted that examines the firm’s mission, strategy, operations, human resources, financial model, and marketing. Key points:

Understanding retailer strategies
Partnering with powerful retailers/distributors
Growth and execution as differentiators
Getting ordinary people to achieve extraordinary goals

Creative Segmentation and Differentiation Strategies
Increasingly, companies face competitors with much lower costs and prices. In response, differentiating one’s value proposition and creatively segmenting the market become critical to success. In addition, a disciplined approach to selling value requires documenting and demonstrating the value delivered to customers. The session will use the easyJet case to demonstrate how a new entrant can create value through creative segmentation and unique value propositions. The presentation will focus on the challenges of developing unique value propositions, competing against low cost players, and value based pricing strategies. Key Points:

Differentiating from competitors
Creative segmentation
Competing against low cost business models

Marketing as Strategy
The presentation will be based on the recently published book entitled Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO’s Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation. Marketing as Strategy is the first book to cast marketing strategy in terms of the CEO’s agenda. Based on more than fifteen years of researching, teaching, and counselling top executives at multinational organizations, the book outlines seven strategic, cross-functional, bottom-line oriented transformation efforts that address the burning issues on the minds of CEOs.

Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge
As retailers have become more powerful and global, they are increasingly focused on their own brands at the expense of manufacturer brands. Rather than simply selling on price, retailers have transformed their private labels into brands. Consequently, manufacturers such as Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, and Procter & Gamble, now compete with their largest customers – major retail chains like Carrefour, CVS, Tesco, and Wal-Mart. The growth in private labels, and its changing character, has huge implications for managers on both sides. Yet, brand manufacturers still cling to their outdated assumptions about private labels. Based on the new book, Private Labels: Competing With and Against Store Brands, this presentation describes the new retailer strategies for private labels, and challenges brand manufacturers to develop an effective response. Most important, it lays out actionable strategies for competing against—or collaborating with—private label purveyors.

Strategies to Fight Low- Cost Rivals
Based on the best selling article in the Harvard Business Review (December 2006). It’s easier to fight the enemy you know than one you don’t. With gale-force winds of competition lashing every industry, companies must invest a lot of money, people, and time to fight archrivals. They find it tough, challenging, and yet strangely reassuring to take on familiar opponents, whose ambitions, strategies, weaknesses, and even strengths resemble their own. CEOs can easily compare their game plans and prowess with their doppelgängers’ by tracking stock prices by the minute, if they desire. However, this obsession with traditional rivals has blinded companies to the threat from disruptive, low-cost competitors. All over the world, especially in Europe and North America, organizations that have business models and technologies different from those of market leaders are mushrooming. Such companies offer products and services at prices dramatically lower than the prices established businesses charge, often by harnessing the forces of deregulation, globalization, and technological innovation. By the early 1990s, the first price warriors had gobbled up the lunches of several incumbents. Now, on both sides of the Atlantic, a second wave is rolling in. These low-cost combatants are changing the nature of competition as executives knew it in the twentieth century. What should leaders do?