Ramesh Thadani graduated in Mechanical Engineering from India and subsequently did his MBA from Boston University in the U.S. where he majored in Marketing and Finance.

He started his working career in 1973 in Planning, Budgeting and Information Systems at Boston University. He was also a consultant to Cambridge Communications Group, a marketing and management consulting firm in Massachusetts.

His career in India started with Clarion Advertising where he spent four years and rose to be Deputy General Manager of the Research Division. After which, he was head of CORE since its inception.

In 1983, Ramesh joined IMRB as its head and took the company from a five office cluster to a multi-country, multi-unit organisation that grew from strength to strength. He set up separate units that specialised in Qualitative Research, Media and Consumer Panels, Social Research, Business-to-Business and Industrial Research and Customer Satisfaction Management and Measurement. As he saw the market need and opportunity, he put a specialist team into place to cater to that need.

During his over 25-year career in marketing re-search and consultancy, he was associated with a very wide spectrum of market research areas. His special interest areas were: Media Research, Continuous/ Panel Research and Forecasting. He was associ-ated with the design and implementation of the NRS since 1983 and the launch of both the Diary and PeopleMeter based Television Audience Measurement Systems in India and Sri Lanka. He had presented papers on Market Research at both national and international symposia.

Besides an active professional career in market research, he was also involved with the academic side of the field. He lectured at Boston University in 1973 and 1974 and was a visiting faculty member at the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, University of Bombay.

He was the major force behind the formation of the Market Research Society of India (MRSI) in 1987-88 on the lines of ESOMAR and MRS. He has also been its past President. He was also instrumental in the development of the Socio-Economic Classifica-tion (SEC) of Urban India under the aegis of MRSI.

Ramesh was a voracious reader and was constantly in search of information that he could use. He was a member of several professional associations and had been the National Representative for the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR).

He was recently nominated as Chairman of the FICCI Sub-Committee on Database Census and Advertising.