Dr. Karthikeyan Balakumar is a Ph.D. in Marketing from IIM Calcutta. He has a PGDM from IIM Trichy and has also secured the Gold Medal for Academic proficiency in Marketing from there. His research interests are:

• Retailing
• Channel Management
• Sales and Distribution
• Digital Marketing

He has also worked in channel sales for the TTK Prestige and had set up a tertiary eye care hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

• Sales and Distribution Management, Retailing, Marketing Research.

• Awarded the Gold Medal for Academic Proficiency in Marketing by the Indian Institute of Management, Trichy in 2014.
• Was part of the team of four that received the prestigious Association for Consumer Research (ACR) Grant of USD 2000 for the group project titled “The Outcaste becomes the Guru- A Unique Case of Indignation Entrepreneurship” to conduct Transformative Consumer Research (TCR).

• “Redesigning after-sales service: Impact on incumbent product distribution channels” Dr. Ritu Mehta and Karthikeyan Balakumar- Volume 58, January 2021, 102279 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2020.102279.
• Coauthored a case titled “Repositioning for success: The Lloyd’s acquisition by Havells India” with Dr. Prashant Mishra, Dr. Madhupa Bakshi, and Dr. Kumar Shreshtha. Case was published by IIMC CRC.
• Authored short stories on Padma Shri. Arunachalam Muruganantham (Padman) and Mrs. Rani Mularidharan to the book “Small Big Bang – Stories of 30 Die Hard Entrepreneurs” - An anthology of short stories on Indian Entrepreneurs edited by Ratan Mani Lal, Published by Grey Parrot Publishers in 2014.

• Karthikeyan Balakumar, Prafulla Agnihotri, Ritu Mehta, & Debabrata Ghosh. Adding clicks to clicks:
  Exploring the impact of encroachment on online incumbents. 2021 AMA Summer Academic Conference,13-15 August 2021.
• Karthikeyan Balakumar, Prafulla Agnihotri, Ritu Mehta, & Debabrata Ghosh. Adding bricks to bricks:
  Understanding revenue impact of physical manufacturer encroachment on entrenched brick and mortar retailers. 2021 AMA Winter Academic Conference, 17-19 February 2021.
• Karthikeyan Balakumar & Ritika Sharma. “The Country of Destination Effect: An Umbra?”. 2018 Australia New Zealand Marketing Conference. (Paper was selected to conference. But not presented).
• Karthikeyan Balakumar & Suganya Balakumar “Ananalysis of the indebtedness of rural labour households”.
  PAN IIM Conference.
• Bhupesh Manoharan, Akshay Narayanan and Karthikeyan Balakumar “Cyber Combat: An Exploratory Investigation into the Fake News Ecosystem and its Implications for Marketing”.