Charan has a PhD in marketing from the Ivey Business School, Canada and was formerly a visiting professor at Tulane University (2015 – 2016). He does research in the areas of brand positioning, cognitive representations of competition and innovation, and consumer decision making in alternate market exchange settings. His research has been published in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Charan has also worked as a senior manager in sales and consulting at global corporations (CSC, Standard Chartered, HCL) in the United States and India.