Rajan Sambandam, PhD

Rajan Sambandam is the President of TRC Insights, a Philadelphia-area market research and analytics firm specializing in pricing research, conjoint analysis, segmentation, brand equity, and AI-powered consumer insights. With more than 30 years at TRC and a doctorate in marketing from the State University of New York at Buffalo, Rajan brings one of the most distinctive combinations of academic rigor and applied research expertise in the consumer insights industry.

His academic credentials extend well beyond his Ph.D. Rajan taught marketing research to MBA students at Columbia Business School as an Adjunct Associate Professor — a role that deepened both his methodological precision and his ability to communicate complex ideas clearly. Before that, he served as a Knowledge Partner to the Yale Center for Customer Insight, translating frontier academic research into practical tools for business decision-makers. He currently collaborates with Columbia Business School faculty — including Professor Oded Netzer, Vice Dean for Research — on applying artificial intelligence to consumer insights, including TRC’s work on digital twins and synthetic data in market research.

Rajan is one of a small number of market research practitioners recognized by the academic community as a genuine bridge between scholarship and practice. The Editor in Chief of Marketing Science, one of the leading peer-reviewed journals in the field, personally invited him to join its Ambassador Network to communicate research findings to practitioner audiences — a designation reflecting rare standing in the industry.

His published work spans more than two decades. In Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, he has authored articles on pricing research frameworks, conjoint sample size methodology, segmentation improvement using max-diff, and — most recently — a co-authored piece on “The Case for Synthetic Data” (November 2025) alongside Professor Netzer of Columbia. He is the co-inventor of TRC’s proprietary Two-Dimensional Max-Diff (2DMD™) methodology, introduced in Quirk’s in 2018, which extends standard max-diff analysis to capture two evaluative dimensions simultaneously. He is also the architect of TRC’s AI-powered digital twin capability, which extends the shelf life of research and enables scenario testing beyond the limits of traditional survey methods.

Across three decades working with Fortune 500 companies and mid-market businesses in healthcare, financial services, fintech, pharmaceuticals, insurance, consumer packaged goods, and technology, Rajan has personally overseen the design and statistical analysis of hundreds of studies. Clients consistently describe him as analytically exceptional, intellectually generous, and focused on delivering insight that drives real decisions — not just interesting findings.

Education: Ph.D. in Marketing, State University of New York at Buffalo

View Rajan’s Full List of  Publications Research, Lectures, and Thought Leadership.

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You can read some of Rajan’s research thoughts at TRC Blog.