Biography
Andrew Ehrenberg was born in Germany in 1926 into a well-known academic family. His father was Hans Ehrenberg, his uncle was the historian Victor Ehrenberg, and Geoffrey and Lewis Elton his cousins. He moved to England with his parents in 1938, and attended Queen's College, Taunton. Subsequently, he studied statistics at Kings College, Newcastle and Cambridge University. In 1951, he became Lecturer in Statistics at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and in 1955 moved into commercial marketing research and consulting, where his writings on statistical methodology in marketing research and wider fields soon became well-known. In 1970, he was invited to take the Chair of Marketing and Communication at the London Business School, where he remained for 23 years, eventually taking up a Research Chair. In 1993, Ehrenberg became Professor of Marketing at the London South Bank University where he founded the Centre for Research in Marketing, and started the Research and Development Initiative which was funded by businesses internationally to pursue and disseminate quantitative marketing knowledge. The R. and D. I. became closely associated with the Marketing Science Centre at the University of South Australia and in 2004, Ehrenberg was succeeded as Director of the R. and D. I. by ProfessorResearch methods
An early interest in social science applications of statistics had already begun to show through in Cambridge (such as extensive experiments into the reliability of trained taste-testers for quality assessments and into price subsidies in the food industry). Also developed were two early aversions, the first to multivariate techniques imposed on simple data, and the second to mathematics for its own sake in applied statistics. Ehrenberg's belief that the methods of physical science are applicable to social science was expressed in an article in the hard science journal Nature. In it he asserted that even in a field dominated by people's impulses to buy, that of marketing, there are striking regularities. The discovery and development of such lawlike relationships, was described in series of papers. The definitive statement of this position came later in another paper read to the Royal Statistical Society. The summary stated baldly: Ehrenberg always pointed out that very many models of very different functional form may be generated with almost identical goodness of fit. The selection of an appropriate model form to express a quantitative relationship is governed in his view by the need for: #Previous knowledge. This seems obvious but standard statistical modelling techniques seldom if ever start from any reference to any earlier model. #Simplicity. Models with many parameters cannot be tested in their variations by new data. #Adequate but not unnecessarily wide scope. Scope means the range of conditions in which the model has been found to apply. Empirical models are not of universal application. Decision on whether the scope is adequate depends on technical knowledge of the topic being modelled. #The absence of bias in predictions. Closeness of fit is secondary to this. Exceptions to the model may be noted. #A structural model, which remains meaningful under algebraic transformation. This rules out regression techniques – even simple regression produces two different equations. The failure to use any technique of optimisation either in model form selection or parameter determination has however been widely criticised. Ehrenberg has answered these criticisms by pointing to the absence of published and widely used models generated by conventional techniques. Another criticism is that Ehrenberg's published models deal with relationships between the averages of groups, and thus ignore variability between individuals. The ideas in this section were used in one of Ehrenberg's principal fields of work, the study of buyer behaviour.Buyer behaviour
In 1955, Ehrenberg moved into marketing research working on consumer panels. His first milestone paper was "The Pattern of Consumer Purchases" which showed the applicability of theData reduction
This is another strand in Ehrenberg's work. In 1975, he first published ''Data Reduction''.Ehrenberg, A. (1975,1981), Data Reduction, John Wiley, Chichester. Reprinted in the Journal of Empirical Generalisations in Marketing Science, 2000, 5, 1–391 (www.empgens.com). The book has been revised, reprinted and translated (Ehrenberg 1981). It maintains that much of the approach to research methods and prediction depends on finding patterns in data and this is much aided by its presentation in simple tables. Such tables also aid communication of results. The basic ideas are very simple. They depend on the principles of how memory works: clear layout of simple tables, rounding of figures, placing figures to be compared in the same column and showing averages. This work has had a major effect in on the way data are presented in academia, commerce but less in the British public sector. There the layout of the official British Monthly Digest of Statistics under Sir Harry Campion antedated Ehrenberg by many years, but set a pattern in many ways the same.Communication
Over more than fifty years, Ehrenberg worked not only to discover new principles and understanding, nearly always using data already available. He worked just as hard to communicate — to write simply and understandably, and to present figures in such a way as to tell an understandable story. His tables and charts always supported his communication. They did not ask the readers themselves to undertake the work of extracting meaning from the data. Ehrenberg drafted and re-drafted, often to the exasperation of his collaborators. He was tireless in presenting and publicising his conclusions on both sides of the Atlantic, though recently to the present writer he observed that his own major failure was in effectively communicating his principles to the users of statistics. His work continues, though, to influence the practice of both statistical science and marketing.References
Bibliography
These include some important papers not specifically mentioned above. * Chatfield C., Ehrenberg, A. and Goodhardt, G. (1966), Progress on a simplified model of stationary purchasing behaviour, '' Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A'', 129, 317–367. * Ehrenberg, A., (1955) Measurement and mathematics in psychology, ''British Journal of Psychology'', 46, 20–29. * Ehrenberg, A., (1964) Description, Prediction and Decision, ''Journal of the Market Research Society'', 13, 14–33. * Ehrenberg, A, Goodhardt, G. and Barwise, P (1990), Double jeopardy revisited, ''Journal of Marketing'', 54, July, 82–91. * Ehrenberg, A. Uncles, M, and Goodhardt, G. (2004), Understanding Brand Performance Measures: Using Dirichlet Benchmarks, ''Journal of Business Research'', 57, 12, 1307–1325. * Scriven, J.A and Ehrenberg, A.S.C. (2004), Consistent Consumer Responses to Price Changes, ''Australasian Marketing Journal'', 12, 3.External links