Remembering Prof. Abraham Koshy: A Legacy Of Mentorship And Marketing Excellence

Indian marketing academia lost one of its shining stars when Prof. Abraham Koshy passed away on 17^th December, a month short of his 72^nd birthday. He worked as a Marketing faculty from 1989 to 2018 at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), which was also his alma mater (He attended the Fellow Program in Management at IIMA, graduating in 1987). He maintained an excellent connection with the industry and was widely revered for his teaching and corporate training excellence. He gained fame and admiration for working with Prof. Philip Kotler and Prof. Kevin Keller on the widely acclaimed Marketing Management textbook. The South Asian adaptation of the book, in which he worked with Prof. Mithileshwar Jha (IIM Bangalore), was widely claimed as the largest-selling textbook in the management discipline.   

Many managers who attended his sessions in management development programs or the post-graduate program at IIMA, who had benefitted from his teaching, remembered him on social media. His loss was mourned by the academic fraternity, who either recalled his contribution in guiding them during their academic journey or his collegiality. I was also fortunate to be guided by him during my doctoral journey at IIMA and my subsequent stint as a faculty member at IIMA. 

During my third year of the FPM program at IIMA, I, along with a fellow FPM student, Sanjeev Tripathi (currently Professor at IIM Indore), approached Prof. Koshy with the request to attend his course on Strategic Brand Management. He said we would have to work hard to be part of the course. We replied that we would read all the cases like any student and come to the class after preparing properly. However, he told us that we'll have to do more than that! As the course progressed, he asked us to evaluate the assignment and evaluation class preparation. More importantly, he spent almost an hour after each session discussing the flow of the session, his reasons for steering the case discussion in a particular manner, and class participation evaluation nuances. He patiently replied to all our queries and guided us as we tried to understand the academic process. He would also ask us to speak about the topics in the class if he felt we had good knowledge about the discussed topic. 

After the SBM course was over, Prof. Koshy asked us to join him in attending the Marketing Management course. For this course, he decided to expand our scope of work. We were expected to critique the course coverage plan, identify the cases for the course as per the identified topics in the course outline, and develop assignments and quizzes. He trained us to explore the case database and asked us to suggest cases with our recommendations. The discussion following our exploration of case databases helped us to understand the process of identifying suitable topics for coverage and the cases for the course, thus making us more confident for our academic career after our doctoral journey. He continued the post-class discussions about the class delivery process, further enriching our understanding of the class handling process. 

I joined IIMA as an assistant professor after completing my doctoral studies. He continued to guide me as I started my academic journey by having regular discussions and involving me in his consulting and case writing projects. He was very clear that it was the responsibility of established faculty members to mentor young faculty colleagues and help build connections with the industry. Whenever I requested him, he connected me with some of the corporate leaders so that I could invite them for guest sessions in my courses.

While mentoring me, he always treated me like a valued colleague whose views were always respected. After teaching Marketing Management together for the first time, I told Prof. Koshy that I wanted to change the course coverage with a greater focus on India-specific cases. He asked me for the rationale, and once he listened to my line of argument, he fully supported me. It meant extra work for him as we replaced almost 50 percent of cases, and he had to put in significant additional effort for his class preparations. However, as he believed in the justification, he supported me without hesitation. 

Whenever I thanked him for his support in guiding my academic journey, he said there was no need to thank him. He used to say that when he joined IIMA, he was mentored by senior colleagues in the Marketing area like Prof. M N Vora and Prof. A K Jain. Hetold me you would have to continue the same tradition with your younger colleagues. This is one learning that I have always tried to follow apart from his focus on explaining marketing without any jargon. He used to say that if you can't explain Marketing without using jargon, you are not clear about your conceptual understanding of the topic. In all my classes, I have kept the class discussions devoid of jargon and explanations as simple as possible. 

Prof. Koshy was a wonderful and caring human being. He helped me and was a mentor for so many people over his long career. His doors were always open for everyone, especially FPM students, who reached out to him with their problems. He was a sounding board for many FPM scholars and colleagues whenever they reached out to him for support in their academic journey. We will miss you, Prof. Koshy. I hope to live up to the learnings imparted to me.   

Prof. Abhishek is a Professor of Marketing at IMT Ghaziabad. He was a faculty with IIM Ahmedabad from 2011 to 2016.