The Marketing Science Researchers Whose Work Actually Holds Up

Most "who to follow" lists in marketing are personality indexes. They reward posting frequency, conference appearances, and hot takes. This one is different. Every person here has produced a named body of work, a specific study, or a testable idea that has held up under scrutiny. The organization is by what you are trying to figure out, not by who is most famous.

Full disclosure: this site is Patrick Gilbert's, so treat his entry and Isaac Rudansky's accordingly. They are here because the list would be dishonest without the people who actually do this work at AdVenture Media, but you should weigh a self-inclusion for exactly what it is.

Note: Andrew Ehrenberg, the namesake of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, is deceased and is presented here for historical context only. The researchers who have built on and extended his tradition are listed in the sections below.

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If You Want to Understand How Brands Actually Grow

Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia has produced more empirically grounded marketing research than any comparable institution over the past two decades. The researchers below are the ones doing that work.

Byron Sharp

Professor of Marketing Science, University of South Australia; Director, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science

Sharp's core argument is that marketers have been operating on faulty assumptions about loyalty, targeting, and differentiation for decades. How Brands Grow (2010) laid out the evidence: brands grow primarily by reaching more buyers, not by deepening relationships with existing ones. The loyal superfan is real but statistically marginal. Growth comes from the mass of light, occasional buyers who barely think about your brand at all.

That finding matters because most marketing budgets are built on the opposite assumption. Campaigns are designed to reward loyalty, to build community, to convert one-time buyers into advocates. Sharp's research says that strategy has the causality backwards. Mental availability and physical availability are the actual drivers.

Chapter 8 of Never Always, Never Never covers exactly this territory. Most consumers are not waiting to fall in love with your brand. They are satisficing their way through purchase decisions, and the brands that win are the ones that are easiest to notice and choose. Sharp's data is the empirical backbone of that argument.

Start with: How Brands Grow (2010). Then Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice, 2nd edition (2017) for the academic treatment.

Jenni Romaniuk

Research Professor and Associate Director (International), Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia

Romaniuk extended the How Brands Grow framework into territory Sharp left partially mapped. Her specific contribution is the science of distinctive brand assets: the colors, characters, shapes, sounds, and taglines that allow a brand to be recognized without a logo in sight. Building Distinctive Brand Assets (2018) turned what had been a creative instinct into a measurement framework.

The most recent book, Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World (2023), is the sharpest treatment available of what brand tracking should actually measure. Most brand health studies measure the wrong things, and this book explains what to measure instead.

The concept of category entry points is also central to her work: the buying situations, needs, and triggers that bring a category to mind. Building a brand means owning as many of those entry points as possible.

Begin with: Building Distinctive Brand Assets (2018). Follow with Better Brand Health (2023) if you manage brand tracking.

John Dawes

Professor of Marketing, UniSA Business / University of South Australia; Associate Director (Operations), Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science

Dawes works in the less glamorous but equally important territory of brand metrics, pricing, repeat-buying behavior, and what actually predicts loyalty. His research has appeared in the Journal of Retailing, Journal of Business Research, the European Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Letters, among others.

His value is specificity. Where Sharp operates at the level of laws and principles, Dawes tends to work at the level of mechanisms: how pricing decisions play out in actual purchase data, how repeat-buying rates shift across categories, what brand metrics are leading indicators versus lagging ones. That makes him the right person to consult when you are trying to move from a principle to a decision.

His site, johndawes.info, is where he publishes accessible summaries of his research.

Nicole Hartnett

Senior Marketing Scientist, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia

Hartnett's focus is advertising creativity and effectiveness measurement: specifically, what makes an ad work at the level of sales, not just recall. She is a Senior Marketing Scientist at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and is associate editor of the Journal of Advertising Research, which gives her work a dual audience of academics and practitioners.

The research on sales-effective advertising content is useful for anyone trying to connect creative decisions to business outcomes. The question she is essentially asking: given everything we know about how memory works and how brands grow, what should an ad actually do? That is a harder question than most creative frameworks acknowledge.

Published work in the Journal of Advertising Research is the best entry point.

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If You Want to Understand Long-Term Effectiveness and Budget Allocation

Built over decades, the IPA Effectiveness Databank is one of the most important sources of evidence in marketing. The two researchers below have spent their careers mining it.

Les Binet and Peter Field

These two are treated together because their most collaborative work is their most cited. Les Binet has been Head of Effectiveness at adam&eve DDB, a Visiting Professor of Marketing and Business Strategy at Ravensbourne University, and has worked on advertising effectiveness since 1987. He helped design and build the IPA dataBANK, a repository of independently verified advertising effectiveness case histories. He has served on the IPA's Effectiveness Leadership Group since 2001.

Peter Field is an independent marketing effectiveness consultant whose analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank spans more than three decades of case histories.

Together, they co-authored Marketing in the Era of Accountability (2007) and developed the 60/40 rule: the finding that roughly 60% of marketing investment should go to long-term brand building and 40% to short-term sales activation. The ratio is a starting point for debate, not a law of physics, but the underlying finding is solid. Short-termism damages brands. Brands that invest consistently in long-term equity generate better pricing power and more resilient revenue over time.

The empirical case here is why brand vs performance marketing is not really an either/or question. It is a sequencing and proportion question.

Read first: Marketing in the Era of Accountability (2007). Les Binet's talks at IPA events are also worth finding. We covered a recent Binet warning in his Cannes 2026 remarks on efficiency as a death spiral.

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If You Want to Understand Attention and Media Science

Karen Nelson-Field

Founder and CEO, Amplified Intelligence; Industry Professor of Media Innovation, The University of Adelaide

Nelson-Field has built a research agenda around a specific question: does the media industry's standard unit of measurement, the impression, actually predict whether an ad drives memory and behavior? She was formerly a senior research associate at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which grounds her in the How Brands Grow tradition.

Her answer, developed across three books and Amplified Intelligence's commercial measurement work, is that impressions are a poor proxy. Active attention time is measurable, varies enormously across formats and placements, and predicts brand outcomes far better than viewability or reach alone.

The Attention Economy and How Media Works: Simple Truths for Marketers (2020) is the accessible starting point. The Attention Economy: A Category Blueprint (2024) moves into practical application for media planning.

Read first: The Attention Economy and How Media Works (2020). Her research at Amplified Intelligence is worth following if you are responsible for media buying.

Rachel Kennedy

University of South Australia

Kennedy's current role at the University of South Australia could not be fully verified from available sources, so this entry does not claim one. What is verifiable: she is affiliated with UniSA and is listed as an author on a 2025 paper titled "How to accurately measure attention to video advertising." That paper sits at the intersection of the Ehrenberg-Bass tradition and the newer attention-science agenda Nelson-Field has pioneered.

For anyone buying video advertising who wants to understand what the measurement community is actually saying about how to evaluate it, her work is worth tracking.

The University of South Australia research profile is the best starting point.

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If You Want to Understand Marketing Analytics and Measurement

Koen Pauwels

Associate Dean of Research and Distinguished Professor of Marketing, Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business; Co-Director, DATA Initiative

Pauwels works at the quantitative end of marketing: market modeling, marketing analytics, and the translation of data into decisions. He is co-director of the Digital, Analytics, Technology, and Automation (DATA) Initiative at Northeastern, which positions his work at the intersection of measurement and digital transformation.

His book It's Not the Size of the Data – It's How You Use It makes the argument that most organizations are not suffering from a data shortage. They are suffering from an interpretation and decision-making problem. That is a useful corrective for any team that has invested heavily in data infrastructure and is still not making better decisions.

Break the Wall addresses the organizational challenge of making digital analytics actually useful across a business, not just legible to analysts. Modeling Markets and Advanced Methods for Modeling Markets are the technical treatments for practitioners who build or commission marketing mix models.

For a managerial audience, start with It's Not the Size of the Data – It's How You Use It. Quantitative practitioners should go to Modeling Markets.

Grace Kite

Founder and Managing Director, magic numbers

Kite brings a PhD in Economics and more than 100 market mix modelling projects to a space that is full of vendor noise and methodology confusion. She publishes regularly in Marketing Week and takes positions that practitioners can actually use.

Her value is translation. Market mix modelling has had a resurgence as a measurement approach, partly because last-click attribution has proven so unreliable, and partly because the platforms that benefited from last-click are no longer the only voice in the room. Kite explains what mix models can and cannot do, what the inputs need to look like, and how to interpret the outputs without being misled by them. For any team considering marketing mix modeling vs attribution, her work is a useful grounding.

Her column in Marketing Week is the right place to start.

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The Practitioner Entry

Patrick Gilbert

Author, Never Always, Never Never; Managing Partner, AdVenture Media

This is the self-inclusion. Read the disclosure at the top of this post and weigh it accordingly.

Gilbert appears on a list of marketing science researchers not because he produces peer-reviewed research. He does not. His contribution is application: taking the Ehrenberg-Bass tradition, the Binet and Field effectiveness research, and the attention-science work, and translating it into decisions that practitioners at AdVenture Media and their clients actually make.

Never Always, Never Never covers the gap between what the research says and what most digital marketing teams do. Chapter 8 specifically addresses the evidence on consumer indifference, polygamous loyalty, and satisficing behavior. The argument is not original to Gilbert, and he says so: it is grounded in Sharp, in consumer psychology research, and in decades of purchase data. The value is the translation into day-to-day campaign and budget decisions.

Read first: Never Always, Never Never, then use this list to go back to the primary sources.

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How to Actually Use This List

Do not read all of these people at once. Pick the problem you are trying to solve right now.

If your immediate question is why your brand is not growing despite strong performance metrics, start with Byron Sharp and then read Never Always, Never Never Chapter 8. If your question is how to defend your brand budget to a CFO who only sees short-term ROAS, start with Les Binet and Peter Field. If you are buying video or social media at scale and want to understand whether you are actually getting attention, start with Karen Nelson-Field. If you are building or commissioning a market mix model, start with Grace Kite or Koen Pauwels.

The research these people have produced is not in competition. It is cumulative. Sharp tells you what drives growth. Romaniuk tells you how to build the memory structures that enable it. Binet and Field tell you how to fund it over time. Nelson-Field tells you whether your media is actually delivering the attention needed for memory to form. Pauwels and Kite tell you how to measure whether any of it worked.

That is a coherent research stack. Use it like one.

For related reading on how these ideas connect to strategy vs tactics in marketing, and why most digital teams conflate the two, the book chapter on that distinction covers the practical consequences in detail. The double jeopardy law and the 95-5 rule are also worth understanding as foundational concepts before the rest of this research will fully make sense.