About

Professor Rajkumar Venkatesan is the Ronald Trzcinski Professor of Business Administration at the UVA Darden School of Business. His academic expertise lies in marketing, with a particular focus on analytics as it relates to marketing return on investment, customer lifetime value, mobile marketing, and the global political economy. He teaches courses such as 'Marketing Technology Products,' 'Marketing Strategy,' and 'Marketing Analytics.' Venkatesan's research has been published in several prestigious journals, including The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Harvard Business Review. He is also a co-author of the book 'Cutting Edge Marketing Analytics.' His work has received numerous awards, such as the Don Lehmann Award, MSI Alden G. Clayton Award, and the ISBM Outstanding Dissertation Proposal Award, among others. Recognized as one of the Top 20 rising young scholars in marketing by the Marketing Science Institute and among the Top 40 professors under 40 by Poets & Quants, he has also consulted with various firms across industries including technology, retail, media, industrial goods, and pharmaceuticals. Venkatesan has developed custom executive education programs and data analytics software for notable organizations such as IBM, General Electric, HBO, and Johnson & Johnson. Before joining Darden, he taught at the University of Connecticut, where he received the MBA Teacher of the Year Award. He holds a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Houston and a B.E. in computer engineering from the University of Madras.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Data science
• Political Science
• Marketing
• Data Mining
• Sociology
• Process management
• Engineering
• Knowledge management
• Public relations

Selected publications

• The Chronicles of Caspari: Should Caspari Expand Its Online Marketplace?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The AI Marketing Canvas, Second Edition

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2025-12-11

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Five essential steps to take you from "zero to superhero" with AI for marketing   For marketers, the landscape is shifting underfoot. Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept but a present-day reality, rewriting the rules of relevance, differentiation, and connection. Navigating this new era is the single greatest challenge, and opportunity, for marketing leaders. How do you move beyond scattered experiments and buzzwords to unlock AI's true transformative power?   In the newly revised and essential second edition of The AI Marketing Canvas, top MBA marketing professors Rajkumar Venkatesan and Jim Lecinski provide the definitive roadmap. They distill complexity into clarity with a field-tested, five-step plan for marketers at every stage of their AI journey. This is not a speculative look at the future; it is a practical guide for winning your "AI Moment of Truth" now.   The concepts, frameworks and examples in the book will enable you to:    Master the two core functions of AI: Wield predictive AI for unparalleled insights and optimization, and generative AI for creating compelling content and communications at scale.    Pinpoint your greatest opportunities: Use a powerful 2x2 framework to identify the highest-value AI use cases for your business, whether driving internal productivity or explosive external growth.    Build your AI "exosuit": Learn how to augment your team's strategic expertise and human judgment with machine intelligence, turning your department into a marketing powerhouse.    Lead with confidence: Navigate the critical challenges of ethics and governance while preparing for the next wave of disruption, from Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to autonomous AI agents.   Rich with case studies, best practices, and the latest insights on AI's impact on decision-making and customer engagement, this book empowers CMOs and marketers alike to harness AI's full potential. Whether you are laying the groundwork for AI adoption, scaling across functions, or reinventing your go-to-market approach, The AI Marketing Canvas provides clarity and confidence at every stage of your journey.   It's not too late to be an early adopter, but the train is leaving the station. This book is your ticket to the forefront of marketing innovation.

  PublisherDOI

• Building AI Capabilities: CFA Institute

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Building AI Capabilities: Yum! Brands

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• YouTube Advertising with Roger Federer: Switzerland's Tourism 2024 Campaign

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Building AI Capabilities: Flipkart

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• War on Aisle 5: Casualties, National Identity, and Consumer Behavior

  Journal of Conflict Resolution · 2024-02-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  A growing body of research argues that external threats from the international system strengthen ethnocentrism and authoritarianism, personal values anchored in national identity. We evaluate a necessary implication of this argument, that these shifting values drive change in broader social behaviors. Our focus is revealed value change in a non-political setting: American consumers’ choice of supermarket brands that symbolize national identity. Our empirical analyses leverage US counties’ quasi-random exposure to US Iraq War casualties to identify the effects of local casualties on the weekly market share growth of “American” supermarket brands. We analyze weekly supermarket scanner data for a representative sample of over 1,100 US supermarkets and 8,000 brands. During 2003-2006, the weekly market share of American brands grew relative to non-American brands in casualty-exposed supermarkets. Variation in share growth across customer demographics is consistent with reactions to external threat. We rule out alternative mechanisms including partisan cues, other product characteristics, and animosity towards other countries. These findings strengthen IR’s theoretical microfoundations by showing that international politics can reshape values enough to change broader social behaviors.

  PublisherDOI

• Grocery Shopping for America: Mitigation Strategies for Threats to National Identity

  Journal of Marketing Research · 2023-08-01 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  People demonstrate indirect support for a nation's identity by consuming products representing their nationality. In such context, this article focuses on how people react toward brands with national associations when the nation faces threats perpetrated by institutions. Institutions are important as they are one of the core elements defining national identity. Institutional threats to national identity can come from within the nation (internal threat) and from outside (external threat). Weekly supermarket scanner data from 2004 showed that sales of American-sounding brands declined in counties that saw higher coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal (internal threat), and sales of American-sounding brands increased in counties with more war casualties (external threat). Seven additional experiments demonstrated that (1) self-enhancement derived from national identity mediates these main effects, (2) advertisements that refocus attention on how the brand helps cope with external threats mitigate the negative effects of internal threats for American brands, and (3) such advertisements do not mitigate the negative effects of internal threats for non-American brands. Qualitative surveys (N = 218), surveys (N = 1,603), experiments (N = 3,123), and secondary data analyses (encompassing sales of over 8,000 brands across more than 1,100 U.S. stores) were used to triangulate the results.

  PublisherDOI

• Customer behavior across competitive loyalty programs

  Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science · 2023-08-08 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Wahoo Fitness: Segmentation and Data Insights

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul Farris

  Landmark College

  21 shared

• V. Kumar

  13 shared

• Shea Gibbs

  University of Virginia

  9 shared

• Werner Reinartz

  9 shared

• V. Kumar

  8 shared

• Gerry Yemen

  6 shared

• Налини Равишанкер

  5 shared

• J. Andrew Petersen

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Don Lehmann Award for the best dissertation-based article
• MSI Alden G. Clayton award
• ISBM Outstanding Dissertation Proposal award
• ISBM award for long-term contributions to business-to-busine…
• Top 20 rising young scholars in marketing by the Marketing S…