Obituary - Andrew Ehrenberg, marketing pioneer

An obituary for Andrew Ehrenberg, the pioneering market researcher and influential academic, who died in August 2010.

Obituary – Andrew Ehrenberg, marketing pioneer

Andrew Ehrenberg, the pioneering market researcher and influential academic, died in August 2010.

Ehrenberg's interests centred upon establishing empirical generalisations applicable in areas like brand buying, TV viewing, consumer attitudes and reactions to price changes. (A wide-ranging summary of his contribution to the industry is available here.)

Among his landmark findings were the Negative Binomial Distribution (NBD) model of buying, ultimately extended to cover brand choice via the NBD-Dirichlet model.

The idea of "Double Jeopardy" proved particularly important, in arguing that a big brand will possess a greater number...

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