Andrew Ehrenberg

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Andrew S.C. Ehrenberg

Born	May 1, 1926 (1926-05-01) (age 82) Southall, Middlesex, UK
Occupation	Academic, Research Professor at London South Bank University
Parents	Hans Ehrenberg
Website www.marketingscience.info/...

Andrew S. C. Ehrenberg (b. 1926) is very widely known as a marketing scientist.

Recently retired at the age of 80 he was Research Professor at London South Bank University, and prior to that Professor of Marketing at London Business School (1970 - 1993).

Andrew Ehrenberg spent most of his working life studying consumers' repeat-buying behaviour^[1]. In half a century of work Andrew fundamentally upturned the beliefs of marketing people about consumer loyalty and also how advertising works. He is famous for discovering that the distribution of brand purchase rates follows a very predictable pattern, the Negative Binomial Distribution (NBD) ^[2]. He is also widely associated with the Double Jeopardy^[3] pattern in attitudes and brand performance metrics.

In the early 1980s, with Gerald Goodhardt and Chris Chatfield, he extended the NBD model to account for brand choices. Finally published in 1984^[4] the NBD-Dirichlet model of brand choice successfully modeled the repeated category and brand purchases within a wide variety of markets. 'The Dirichlet', as it became known, accounts for a number of empirical generalisations, including Double Jeopardy, the Duplication of Purchase law, and Natural Monopoly^[5]. It has been shown to hold over different product categories, countries, time, and for both subscription and repertoire repeat-purchase markets^[6]. It has been described as one of the most famous empirical generalisations in marketing, along with the Bass model of diffusion of innovation.

[edit] References

^ "My Research in Marketing: how it happened" - invited contribution to American Marketing Association's Marketing Research
^ Ehrenberg, A.S.C. (1959), "The Pattern of Consumer Purchases," Applied Statistics, 8 (No. 1), 26-41.
^ Ehrenberg, Andrew S.C., Gerald J. Goodhardt, and T. Patrick Barwise (1990), "Double Jeopardy Revisited," Journal of Marketing, 54 (July), 82-91
^ Goodhardt, Gerald J., Andrew S.C. Ehrenberg, and Christopher Chatfield (1984), "The Dirichlet: A Comprehensive Model of Buying Behaviour," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 147 (part 5), 621-55.
^ Ehrenberg, Andrew S.C., Mark D. Uncles, and Gerald G. Goodhardt (2004), "Understanding Brand Performance Measures: Using Dirichlet Benchmarks," Journal of Business Research, 57 (12), 1307-25.
^ Sharp, Byron, Malcolm Wright, and Gerald Goodhardt (2002), "Purchase loyalty is polarised into either repertoire or subscription patterns," Australasian Marketing Journal, 10 (3), 7.