Labdhi Bhandari

In 1976, Bhandari returned to the faculty of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad where he was acknowledged as an excellent teacher by his students and colleagues and, in time, described as the 'star' of the marketing faculty and the leading marketing academic in the country. He served as the Chairman of the Marketing Area, of the Management Education Program (MEP), and of Management Development Programmes. He was also the first Chairman of the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Management Development Centre, and was responsible for the first major upgrade of its facilities. He also served on the second Committee for Future Directions and chaired the Institute's Task Force on International Management. In 1986, he won a research award from the Colgate Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia where he spent a summer. According to V. Krishnamurthy, then Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIM Ahmedabad, Bhandari was in the running to succeed Prof. NR Sheth as Director of the institute in 1989 after his name was prominently proposed by both the faculty and the alumni. He had been sounded out about the likelihood of his selection just before his death in 1988.

In 1972, Bhandari was recruited by Ravi J. Matthai to the faculty of his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. The institute sponsored his doctoral studies through a Ford Foundation grant and he earned his PhD in 1976 from the Columbia Business School working with Prof. John U. Farley and writing a dissertation on Social Marketing. His dissertation, entitled Communications for social marketing: a methodology for developing communication appeals for family planning programs, won the Honorable Mention in the John A. Howard/AMA Doctoral Dissertation Competition in 1976. He is considered a pioneer of social marketing in India by his colleague Prof. Anil Kumar Gupta.

Bhandari was recruited straight out of IIM Ahmedabad by Hindustan Lever Limited in 1967 to work in their marketing division. At HLL, he was the product manager of Surf (detergent) during India's first detergent war, where he played an important role in defending Surf's leadership position in the Indian market against Swastik Oil Mill's Sway detergent. Later he headed the Client Services Group of the Marketing Research department as the youngest Senior Manager in the company, in which role he did the early market research that led to the development of Liril.

Labdhi Bhandari (29 July 1948 – 19 October 1988) was the State Trading Corporation of India Professor of Marketing at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and a widely respected authority on marketing in India.

Bhandari was born in 1948 in the village of Khimel, near Rani, Rajasthan, to Akal Kanwar Bhandari and her husband, Dhanpati Raj Bhandari, a successful lawyer in Sojat and a member of the Indian National Congress. He grew up in Sojat where he was initially home schooled and then attended a local Hindi-medium government school. At the age of 14, he moved to Jodhpur for his undergraduate studies at the University of Jodhpur, taking a bachelor's degree in economics in 1965. He then applied and was admitted to the second batch of the new Post-graduate Programme in Management offered by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, where he was the youngest student at the age of 17. He was awarded the National Merit Scholarship in both the years and took his diploma from IIMA with the 5th rank in 1967.