Marketing Scientist Andrew Ehrenberg Dies

Marketing scientist and consumer behaviour specialist Andrew Ehrenberg died last week at the age of 84.

Ehrenberg was born in May 1926 in Heidelberg, Germany into a well-known academic family, which sought asylum in England in 1938.

Once there, he attended Queen's College, Taunton, and later studied statistics at Kings College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Cambridge, before becoming a Lecturer in Statistics at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

He then took a post with the Attwood Consumer panel (which later became TNS), after which he co-founded Aske Research with Gerald Goodhardt.

In 1970, he was appointed Chair of Marketing and Communication at the London Business School, where he remained for 23 years.

Then in 1993, he became Professor of Marketing at London South Bank University, and founded the Centre for Research in Marketing, and the Research and Development Initiative (R and DI) - which has now been integrated into the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Research in Marketing at the University of South Australia.

During his career, Ehrenberg was twice awarded the Market Research Society's Gold Medal, and also received the Advertising Research Foundation Great Mind Lifetime Achievement Award.

Throughout his working life, Ehrenberg studied consumers' repeat-buying behaviour, consumer loyalty and the drivers of advertising. He is most famous for introducing the NBD (Negative Binomial Distribution) model of buying, and extending this to brand choice with the NBD-Dirichlet model.

'We are very sad to lose a legendary figure in marketing, market research and the statistics field,' the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute said in a message on its web site.

'Over his life Professor Andrew Ehrenberg's contribution to the development of marketing science has been enormous, and the Institute (with colleagues at the Ehrenberg Centre, London SouthBank) will build on his legacy as we continue to develop empirical generalizations in marketing.'

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.