Professor Lakshman Krishnamurthi received a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Madras, an MBA from LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a Master's degree in Statistics as well as his Ph.D. degree in Marketing, both from Stanford University. He is the Montgomery Ward Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School, Northwestern University. In his twenty-six year career at Kellogg, Professor Krishnamurthi served as the Chairman of the Marketing department for eleven years.

He has published widely in prominent academic journals and has won several research awards. Some of the awards he has received are the Sidney Levy Award for teaching excellence in the years 1999, 2001 and 2003; won the Donald Lehmann Award(2000), for best paper based on a dissertation published in the Journal of Marketing Research; Paul Green Best Paper Award (1999) for best paper in the Journal of Marketing Research; John D.C. Little Best Paper Award (1988) for best paper in Marketing Science; won Best Paper Award (1991), AMA Summer Educators' Conference and was the finalist, for the William O'Dell award (1990) for his paper published in Journal of Marketing Research, 1985-90 He teaches Marketing Strategy and Pricing in a wide variety of programs at the Kellogg School, and has been recognised for his teaching through several awards. He consults and conducts executive programs for a number of companies such as Motorola, Merck KgaA, Johnson & Johnson, British Petroleum, Novartis, Wolters Kluwer, Honeywell, Peninsula Hotels, Chicago Tribune, Coca Cola, Abbott, Procter & Gamble (Latin America), and others

Session 1: Marketing Strategies in New Markets
• The key to achieving sustainable advantage in newly formed markets includes:
- Preference formation
- Preemptive positioning
- Leading to switching costs
• Discussion of sources of early mover advantage
• Discussion of when early movers fail
• Several examples, both product and service, will be used to highlight the principles of the presentation.

Session 2: Marketing Strategies in Established Markets
• Marketing strategies to be followed by small players and by large players:
- Small players have two basic options, namely niche strategies (differentiated) and me-too strategies (non-differentiated).
- Niche strategies can be of five types (low price, high price, high functionality, extreme, and encirclement)
- Concept of ‘Me-too strategies’
- Concept of ‘guerilla marketing’
- Marketing strategies for large players include confrontation (going head-to-head), differentiation (leapfrogging), and penetration (large player using price to buy share).

Session 3: Marketing Strategies in Maturing Markets
• Competing in a maturing or slow-growth market.
• The marketer’s need to fundamentally re-think differentiation because product differentiation is becoming harder:
- Shift from product differentiation to service differentiation to personality differentiation to buying experience differentiation to solutions differentiation
• Criticality of achieving cost leadership
• Aspects of broad market leadership, focused market leadership, niche leadership, harvesting, and divesting.