Suresh Ramanathan

Suresh Ramanathan is an associate professor of Marketing at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He received his PhD in marketing from the Stern School of Business, New York University. He has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and a B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Prior to obtaining his PhD, he worked with Brooke Bond Lipton India Ltd. (a subsidiary of Unilever), JWT, Lintas, MTV and McCann-Erickson. He teaches Consumer Behavior and Advanced Marketing Strategy at the University of Chicago. He has also taught Consumer Behavior and Advertising Management at New York University.

Ramanathan's research focuses on understanding consumer goals and emotions as drivers of behavior over time. His work provides insights into the dynamics that arise when a consumer displays different patterns of behavior or judgments about a product/experience at different points in time. Such differences may occur due to several reasons. First people do not have the same goals at every point in the decision process. Rather, their goals evolve and come into conflict with other goals that may emerge later during the decision process. Second, people may not feel the same way about their past behavior and their emotions about past actions may decay at different rates, leading to different consequences for future behavior. Ramanathan studies the ongoing dynamics of desire, guilt and willpower in the context of self-control dilemmas. Together, this stream of research is relevant to marketers who might be interested in understanding very low-involvement/impulsive decision making. At the same time, it is also very relevant for public policy makers who are concerned with rising rates of obesity and binge drinking.

A second stream of research focuses on the dynamics of shared consumption. Many experiences are jointly consumed with friends, family or even strangers. Ramanathan’s work explores the nature of the mental processes guiding such shared experiences and shows the importance of studying non-verbal behavior such as exchanges of smiles or frowns during the course of the experience. Such non-verbal cues have a strong effect on how people subsequently evaluate the experience, despite their not being aware of the influence of these cues. These findings are relevant to marketers interested in designing customer experiences, e.g., at movie theaters, shopping malls, theme parks.

Ramanathan has presented his research at many universities and conferences in the United States and abroad. His research has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology.