Kusum Ailawadi is the Charles Jordan 1911 TU'12 Professor of Marketing at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Her research focuses on the strategic interaction and distribution of power between manufacturers and their distribution channel partners. She examines the impact of store brands, promotions, and brand equity on the performance of manufacturers and retailers, and studies consumer, competitor, and retailer response to major marketing-relevant policy changes. In a separate research stream, Ailawadi also studies the relationship between marketing actions, consumers’ health status, and the nutritional quality of consumers’ grocery food shopping.
She has published extensively in the top marketing journals, including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science. She has won or been a finalist for several best paper awards and long-term impact awards from these and other journals. Her work has also been honored for excellence in collaborative research between academics and practitioners, and for outstanding application of marketing science methods to practice. In addition to her academic articles, she has written for practitioner audiences in publications like the Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Advertising Age’s CMO Forum. She is co-author of “Getting Multi-Channel Distribution Right,” a 2020 book that distills lessons from academic research and practice for selecting and managing physical and digital distribution channels.
Ailawadi is the president of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science and an associate editor for Journal of Marketing. Previously, she has served as an associate editor for International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Journal of Retailing. She has also been an academic trustee of the Marketing Science Institute and AiMark, organizations in the United States and Europe that bring together academics, senior practitioners, and data providers to facilitate research and idea exchange. She is currently on the advisory boards of Better Marketing for a Better World and the AiMark Marketing Science hub.
She teaches a highly regarded elective on Multi-Channel Routes to Market. Previously, she taught the Statistics for Managers course in Tuck's MBA core and electives in Marketing Research and Marketing Strategy for many years. She has consulted with or conducted training programs for companies in the consumer goods, retailing, consulting, and financial services sectors and served as a consulting or testifying expert in legal cases related to distribution, brand equity, and promotions.
Ailawadi received her PhD from the University of Virginia and taught at the Darden School at the University of Virginia and the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College before joining Tuck in 1993. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked in marketing management for Computer Maintenance Corporation (CMC) Ltd. in India. She received her undergraduate degree with honors in physics from St. Stephens College, Delhi University, and her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore.