Murali Krishna Mantrala will be joining the University of Missouri as
the Sam M. Walton Professor of Marketing in Fall 2003. Currently, he is a
Manager at ZS Associates Inc, an international Sales and Marketing consulting
firm in Evanston, Illinois, and adjunct associate professor of marketing in the
University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and Duke University’s Fuqua
School of Business.
Murali holds a Ph.D. in Marketing (1987) from the Kellogg School, Northwestern
University; MBAs from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (1976) and
the University of Minnesota (1981), and a B.S in Physics (1974) from the
University of Delhi.
Prior to his move to ZS Associates in fall 1999, Murali was the J.C. Penney
Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Florida, Gainesville,
Florida, where he joined as assistant professor in 1986. Murali’s research
interests and expertise fall in the areas of retailer pricing and category
management, sales and advertising management, and pharmaceutical products
marketing. He has published articles on these subjects in leading marketing and
management science journals including Journal of Marketing, Interfaces,
Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Managerial and Decision
Economics and European Journal of Operations Research.
Murali’s pioneering research at the University of Florida in the domain of
dynamic fashion retailer order quantity and price markdown optimization models
and algorithms began with inputs from retail merchandise managers at a major US
retailer in the late 1980s, resulting in the development of MARK, now
called “B_Line,” the first field-tested implementable PC-based markdown
decision support system, described in the April 1994 issue of STORES (RR1-RR6)
published by the National Retail Federation (NRF), the University of Florida
research journal EXPLORE (Spring 1996), and the technology magazine ComputerWorld
(1996). During the next few years, the B_Line system was presented at a number
of leading universities including Rutgers, NJ, Baruch College, IN, the
Thunderbird School, AZ, and the University of Connecticut, at the 1996 EIRASS
(European Institute of Retailing and Service Studies) Conference on Recent
Advances in Retailing and Services Science, in Innsbruck, Austria, and to
leading management consulting firms including Sabre Decision Technologies,
Anderson (now Accenture) Consulting, ComShare, JDA Arthur and KPMG. Between
1995-2000, the B_Line system has continued to improve and evolve into a
sophisticated, robust and powerful but easy-to-use scientific buy quantity and
markdown decision aid and tool for fashion retail buyers and merchants, see
e.g., the article in the May 2001 issue of Interfaces, the applications
journal of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science
(INFORMS). This evolution was greatly aided by inputs from fashion
merchandising executives and buyers at a number of US department stores and
specialty retailers.
In other research, Murali coauthored a paper on optimal advertising media
scheduling in Marketing Science that won the Frank M. Bass Award of the
INFORMS College on Marketing in May 1999 while two of his papers related to
marketing resource allocation decisions were Finalists for the William F.
O’Dell award for the most impactful article published in the 1992 and 1994
issues of the Journal of Marketing Research.
Murali has taught regular MBA and/or Executive MBA classes in Marketing
Strategy, Marketing Research and Sales Force Management at UF, Northwestern,
Columbia, Rutgers, Vanderbilt and Washington (St. Louis) Universities.
Additionally, he has taught Executive Education programs in Marketing Models
and Strategy at Nortel Networks and AT&T Universal Card Services.
Murali was formerly a Sales Executive in the erstwhile Sandoz Pharmaceuticals
(India), Bombay (Mumbai), with direct responsibility for sales targets. More
recently, his work at ZS Associates includes projects for client companies from
the pharmaceuticals, insurance and multimedia broadcasting industries.
