Dr. Nirmalya Kumar is Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of Aditya Birla India Centre at London Business School. He is one of the world‘s leading thinkers on strategy and marketing; having also taught at Harvard Business School, IMD (Switzerland) and Northwestern University (Kellogg School of Management).

As an author, Nirmalya has written seven books, five of which are published by Harvard Business Press: Marketing as Strategy (2004), Private Label Strategy (2007), Value Merchants (2007), India‘s Global Powerhouses (2009), and India Inside (2012). His latest book is Brand Breakout: How Emerging Market Brands Will Go Global

Nirmalya is an outlier among marketing professors, having accomplished the rare feat of publishing six articles each in both the Journal of Marketing Research (the premier journal for marketing academics) and the Harvard Business Review (the premier journal for business practice). His publications have attracted more than 10,000 citations on Google Scholar.

As a consultant, coach, and conference speaker, Nirmalya has worked with more than 50 Fortune 500 companies in 60 different countries. He has served on several boards of directors, including billion dollar plus companies and companies included in India‘s stock indices.

Nirmalya received his B.Com. from Calcutta University (graduating first in a class of 5,251 students), his MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (scoring a perfect 5.0 grade point average), and his PhD in marketing from Kellogg Graduate School of Management (winning the Marketing Science Institute‘s Alden G. Clayton Award for his PhD dissertation).

All of the above has led to 500 press appearances, six European case (ECCH) adoption awards, as well as several teaching, research, and lifetime achievement honors. In 2010, Speaking.com voted Nirmalya amongst the top 5 marketing speakers worldwide; the Economic Times placed him 6th on the list of Global Indian Thought Leaders; whilst the Economist referred to him as a "rising superstar" in their cover story "The New Masters of Management." In 2011, he was included in Thinkers50 (the biannual listing of the top 50 management thinkers in the world) and received their "Global Village Award" (for the person who contributed most to the business community‘s understanding of globalization and the new frontiers established by the emerging markets). In 2012 he was named among the 50 Best Business School Professors and in 2013 among the 50 most influential B-School professors.

In his personal life, Nirmalya is a passionate supporter of the arts. He is the custodian of amongst the largest known private collection of paintings by Jamini Roy (1887-1972; the father of Indian modern art) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941; the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize). In recognition of his patronage and promotion of South Asian Art, SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies of University of London) awarded him an Honorary Fellowship in 2012.