Kirthi Kalyanam

Santa Clara University

Dr. Kalyanam is the L.J. Skaggs Distinguished Professor and Director of the Retail Management Institute at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. He is also the founder of CausalX. He has also served as an independent director of Overstock.com, as Faculty Director of the Executive MBA program, a visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, a guest faculty in the Stanford Executive MMP program, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of SpinCircuit Inc, a provider of supply chain integration services to the electronics industry. He received his Ph.D. in business administration from the Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. Dr. Kalyanam advises and consults early stage and growth oriented companies in Silicon Valey. has advised or consulted for Google, Motor Image, IBM, Comscore Networks, Propel Corporation, Xambala, Kiwi Networks, Symphoniq Corp, Boorah, CoffeeTable, [24]-7.ai, Pebble Post and SiTime. He has served as a board advisor and consultant to the Commander of AAFES, a $9B retailer ranking #36 in the Top 100 Retailers. He designed and delivered the first Retail University program at Google. His research and expertise are in Digital Marketing and Retailing, Quantitative Marketing and the intersection of these areas. His publications include “The Perfect Message at the Perfect Moment” and “When is the New What” in the Harvard Business Review, “From Volume to Value” in the California Management Review. He is a co-author of the book Internet Marketing & eCommerce published by Thomson. His academic publications have appeared as lead articles in Marketing Science, The Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Management Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, Marketing Letters, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing and Journal of Interactive Marketing. His research paper published in The Journal of Marketing Research on market potential estimation was selected as a finalist for the American Marketing Association’s Paul E. Green Award for impact on the practice of marketing. His paper on Measuring Position effects on Google published in Marketing Science was a finalist for the John D.C. Little Award. His paper on measuring offline effects of search advertising was the winner of the 2019 Dick Wittink Award for best paper in Quantitative Marketing and Economics, one of most prestigious academic marketing journals. His research paper published in The Journal of Marketing Research on retargeting effects of advertising was selected as a finalist for the American Marketing Association’s Paul E. Green Award and was also selected as a 2024 finalist for the Weitz-Winer-O'Dell Award for long term impact. Dr. Kalyanam teaches in the undergraduate, graduate and executive programs He has received the Deans award for Outstanding Innovation in Teaching Pedagogy and has been recognized as one of the top-rated teaching faculty on multiple occasions. Dr. Kalyanam is a dynamic speaker. He leads executive seminars on Internet Disruption, the Amazon and Wal-Mart Effect in Retailing and has trained executives from over 10 countries. His clients have included ABN-AMRO, ABP, APG (Netherlands), Acuson, Army and Air force Exchange Service (AAFES), The American Video Duplicators Association, BI (Norway), Barco (Belgium), Blackstone Group Carrefour (France), Cisco Systems (San Jose), CSM (Netherlands), Daehan Oil Corporation (S. Korea), De Lage Landen (Netherlands), Gap, Google, Harvard Business Review Latin America, Hewlett Packard, Infotech (Mexico), IBM, IMD (Switzerland), Monash University (Australia), Overstock.com, Indian School of Business, Siemens, Wipro (India), Tan Chong Group, Thai Management Association, Tias-Nimbas Business School (Netherlands) & Trimble Navigation. He has co-produced the Internet Retailing Bootcamps with Shop.org and has served as an advisor to the State of Retailing Online (SORO) research study and has chaired the Shop.org Thinktank. Dr. Kalyanam’s has provided expert testimony in over 20 cases cases in the domain of marketing practices, Internet Marketing, Retailing and Database Marketing. His work has included evaluating Internet advertising, business models, market research, and damage assessment using transaction databases and testimony on industry best practices. His clients have included the California Attorney General, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and some of the most well-known Fortune 500 firms.