The AMA Foundation (AMAF) is proud to recognize V. “Seenu” Srinivasan as the recipient of the 2025 V. Kumar Doctoral Student Mentorship Award! This biennial award celebrates academics in the field of marketing who are productive scholars and who have been instrumental in developing doctoral students in marketing.
Award winners have made significant and recognition-worthy contributions to the advancement of PhD students in marketing and helped create the pipeline of marketing scholars who continue to contribute to the marketing discipline through their research, teaching, and service. To learn more about the V. Kumar Doctoral Student Mentorship Award, click here.
Professor V. “Seenu” Srinivasan received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (Chennai), and was the gold medalist in his graduating class. He worked for two years as a production-planning engineer at Larsen and Toubro, Mumbai prior to joining Carnegie-Mellon University where he received his MS and PhD in industrial administration. He is currently the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB). He was formerly the director of the Stanford GSB PhD Program, chair of the marketing area, and the faculty director of its Strategic Marketing Management program in Executive Education.
Professor Srinivasan’s primary research interest in marketing is in the measurement of customer preference structures (conjoint analysis) and its role in product and service planning and pricing. The name “Conjoint Analysis” was coined by him and the late Prof. Paul Green in a research paper in 1978. He has also contributed to other market research areas such as salesforce compensation plans, measurement of brand equity, and market structuring. He was an associate editor of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science. He received the Parlin Award for outstanding contributions to marketing research, the Churchill Award for lifetime achievement in marketing research, the Converse Award for outstanding contributions to the development of the science of marketing, and the Buck Weaver Award for lifetime contributions to the advancement of theory and practice in marketing science. He has received ten best research paper of the year awards including three John Little Awards and two O’Dell Awards.
While his own publication record, citation counts, and accomplishments all attest to his remarkable productivity, Seenu’s impact can also be seen in his true dedication to doctoral education and the
development of young scholars to which he devoted enormous time and energy. Professor Srinivasan was the doctoral dissertation chair for thirteen doctoral students. His students were placed in top universities upon their graduation where continue to serve, advising doctoral students of their own. While he was full-time on the faculty of Stanford, Seenu served on the doctoral thesis committees of all doctoral students in quantitative marketing, and many of the doctoral students in behavioral marketing in addition to mentoring other marketing faculty members who were neither his doctoral students nor his coauthors.
“Seenu has a special set of talents that are very well-suited for doctoral education – I think of these as the ‘secret sauce’ of Seenu’s mentoring recipe,” shared Randolph E. Bucklin, Professor of Marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management and one of Seenu’s many mentees. “In his teaching, in conversation, and in his written and oral remarks, Seenu is unfailingly clear, precise, and incisive. His range of knowledge in marketing was extraordinary, enabling him to comment authoritatively across essentially the entire field. The secret sauce is the subtle influence all of this has on how one pursues their own scholarship and the motivation for excellence it imbues. Seenu’s special way of mentoring served to build students as scholars for the long-run and for careers as leading academics.”
Professor Srinivasan is a Fellow of the American Marketing Association, a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and a Fellow of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS). The American Marketing Association has established the “Srinivasan Young Scholar Award in Quantitative Marketing” awarded annually at its summer conference.
Professor V. “Seenu” Srinivasan will be honored in person at the AMAF Awards Luncheon during the 2025 Winter Academic Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, February 14-16, 2025.