Rajeev Batra is the S.S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he has taught courses on Strategic Brand Management, Advertising Management, Database Marketing, Marketing Research, and Sales Promotion. Batra has been at Michigan since 1989. He was previously on the faculty of the Columbia University Business School in New York. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the Stanford University Business School (1984) and has an M.S. in Advertising from the University of Illinois (1980), and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (1975-77).

His research interests cover the creation and management of brand equity; the improvement of marketing communications productivity; emotional advertising; advertising repetition and budgeting, global branding, and marketing in emerging economies. He has published over 50 articles on these topics in leading academic journals or books, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, and others. He is also the co-author or co-editor of 7 books, including “The New Emerging Market Multinationals” (McGraw-Hill, 2012), which was selected as the “Best Business Book of 2012” in the Strategy area, by Strategy + Business magazine. Professor Batra received the CORE Senior Faculty Research Award from the Ross School of Business in 2014.  He is on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, the International Journal for Research in Marketing, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Interactive Marketing, and others. His work has been cited over 10,000 times in the academic literature and has won several awards for long-term impact.

Prior to beginning his academic career Batra was a Brand Manager in India with Chesebrough-Pond's. He has had teaching, consulting or research relationships on advertising and direct marketing issues with various advertising and marketing firms, including American Express, Blackberry, Book-of-the-Month Club, Citibank, Black & Decker, DBS Bank, Ford Motor Company, Foote Cone and Belding/True North Communications, Hakuhodo Advertising (Japan), Johnson & Johnson, the Interpublic Group of Advertising Agencies, Eli Lilly, General Electric, General Motors, Hughes Aerospace, McCann-Erickson, Meredith, N.W. Ayer, Newsweek, Prudential AARP, Pulte Corporation, Sara Lee Direct, Scudder, Siemens Medical, Unilever, Whirlpool, WIPRO Corporation (India), Wrangler Jeans, and the U.S. Government Census Bureau.

He co-taught Direct Marketing Statistics and Modeling courses for the Direct Marketing Association, New York, from 1986 to 2010. He has also taught seminars on Branding, and Improving Marketing Communications Productivity, in the US, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Guatemala, India, Italy, Japan, Peru, S. Korea, Sweden, Turkey and the UK. He has served as the Area Director for Marketing of the William Davidson Institute and is the co-Director of the Yaffe Center for Persuasive Communication at the Ross School of Business. He was Chair of the Marketing Area at the Ross School of Business from 2003-2007.