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Andrew Ehrenberg, who died last August at the age of 84, was an unlikely radical.
Hailing from a German academic family that escaped Hitler in 1939, he became a London statistics professor, spending the better part of three decades at two institutions. Though--as he remarks in a strange autobiographical paper available online--he swaddled a young Olivia Newton-John, his life was far from glamorous and his passing got little attention in the press. The task of eulogizing was left to wonkish research organizationsthat naturally highlighted his relationship to inscrutable concepts like "negative binomial distribution."
How Mr. Ehrenberg's legacy should have been described is this: He gave us the empirical basis to doubt deeply any number of marketing truisms, from the importance of brand loyalty to the relevance of market segmentation to the idea that advertising can persuade people to buy something to the notion that mass marketing is dead to the assumption that social media should be valued differently from other media.
His work, doled out over decades in arid academic prose nearly impossible for a layman to understand and in marginally more comprehensible interpretations, makes compelling cases against many marketing laws adhered to today. Coming under intellectual fire are disciplines like customer-relationship management and thinkers from Philip Kotler to Kevin Roberts and his notion that great brands have emotional connections with their buyers and, hence, are "Lovemarks."
In his Ehrenberg-influenced 2010 book, "How Brands Grow," Byron Sharp takes aim at Mr. Roberts' book. "A more down-to earth view is that if buyers don't care deeply about a brand then they could easily be lured away by another brand," he wrote. "Yet even this supposedly common-sense statement is actually an untested empirical assumption. It's just as possible to argue that a lack of caring is...