Author: Tanmay Lonkar

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Customer testimonials

Brian Kostantin (World Education Services):

“It’s great to reconnect. Collaborating with you was a fantastic experience. You took the time to truly understand our problem, took the data we provided, applied your expertise and rigor to our questions, and provided a response that not only backed our position but helped us tell a compelling, data-driven story.

That work enabled us to win budget and resources to invest in new initiatives and programs. Ultimately, it helped drive a 30% global revenue diversification in the higher-ed segment and a 150% increase in top-of-funnel awareness—enabling us to hit our strategic targets for US growth two years early! While the broader market and political climate later brought revenue shifts beyond our control, the foundation you helped build was incredibly impactful.”

Delphine Fournier, CRM Senior manager at L’Occitane 

Below video is the full presentation of our Practice Prize for Managing Multichannel Marketing; Delphine’s part starts at 25:30

Leon Suijkerbuijk, CEO of Inofec

A much younger me introduces Inofec’s CEO at minute 2:00 on ‘Marketing’s Profit Impact: Quantifying Online and Offline Funnel’s Progression’

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why hire Prof Koen Pauwels as a consultant?

Is Pauwels a real-life expert or an academic with no practical track record?

Yes, Koen Pauwels is Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM), with dozens of awards for 100+ publications.  He also worked for 5 years as Principal Research Scientist at Amazon Ads and consulted for over 15 companies, including tech (Microsoft, Tiktok), food (Mars and Unilever), retail (L’Occitane and Marks & Spencer), entertainment (FX Disney), durables (Nissan, Sony), services (Kayak and WES), and B2B (Suffolk, Tetrapak, Vistaprint) . His work combines peer-reviewed research with direct applied experience.

What’s the difference between hiring him versus a traditional agency ? Agencies execute campaigns. This engagement is built around diagnosing what’s actually driving your marketing performance, using validated analytics frameworks, and translating that into decisions your team can act on. The frameworks come from research that has been tested across companies and industries, not from a single agency’s playbook.

Has he worked with companies my size, or only large enterprises?

Prof Pauwels has worked for companies with fewer than 100 employees (eg Inofec, Knewton) and very large companies such as Amazon and Unilever.

Why is Koen Pauwels the best marketing academic on the planet?

Mark Ritson called him this way in the Marketing Week column of November 13, 2023 “Effectiveness Ignorance has left American Marketing lagging behind the rest of the world’. Lamenting the low knowledge of marketing effectiveness in the USA, he provides exceptions:

‘If you asked me for the best marketing academic on the planet I would reply Koen Pauwels from Northeastern University. He knows more about effectiveness than anyone.’

Proof of results

What outcomes has Prof Pauwels delivered for past clients?

The best illustrations are the peer-reviewed Practice Prize papers, which require the named client to comment on Pauwels’s application of marketing science to improved results.

For Inofec, Pauwels designed and implemented a full marketing mix model, as visualized in an analytic dashboard where decision makers could run what-if scenarios on proposed budget and allocation changes. They implemented this in a geo field experiment, showing a 14x higher profit growth than the baseline region.

For L’Occitane en Provence, Pauwels linked the CRM on hundreds of current and prospective customers with their response to marketing actions, demonstrating a mismatch across the analyzed countries of the USA, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Reallocating the same budget in a field experiment resulted in 13.5% higher revenues.

Has he worked on problems like mine?

His applied work spans marketing analytics and measurement, brand equity, influencer marketing strategy, political marketing, and how AI is reshaping marketing and advertising. If your challenge touches any of these areas, there is direct prior experience to draw on.

Scope and process

What do I actually get: a report, a retainer, a workshop, a keynote?

As you wish. Pauwels has delivered reports in person, also to the C-suite. Retainers work for longer engagements. Workshops are a favorite way for Pauwels to work with your people so they can take it from there. A keynote helps to spread the word and get buy-in

How long does an engagement typically take? It depends on the problem and your urgency. The fastest is a quick diagnostic, help with selecting vendors, or evaluating their work. Longer engagements help with ongoing implementation, and frequent updates based on changing events

Does he do the analysis himself, or hand it off to a team? A personally trained team is on standby for replications or larger engagements, but Pauwels prefers to do the first take himself.

What data or access do I need to provide upfront? As detailed in ‘Demonstrating the Value of Marketing”, Pauwels often analyzes your historical data first, pinpointing the best areas to run a field experiment, which in turn gives higher quality data for modeling (the MEME iteration). Typical inputs include sales, marketing spend, and brand tracking data.

How much will it cost?

Pricing depends on the scope and format: hourly, project-based, retainer, or % of the demonstrated gains. Get in touch for a quote? Please email at koen.h.pauwels@gmail.com

 

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Why choose prof Koen Pauwels as your marketing effectiveness consultant?

Combining 25 years as the ‘best marketing academic on the planet’ (Marketing Week, 2023) with practical implementation across industries and continents, I can think of 7 reasons:

TL; DR: double-digit top line and bottom line gains, diagnosing and solving YOUR problem, cross-functional and C-suite translation, thought leadership, AI native efficiency, the best latest research, and a global CMO network.

1. Measurement excellence gets you double-digit results:

You know it will be done right, because I don’t cut corners that matter or tell you (just) what you want to hear. I bring in my experience from very different situations AND everything marketing scientists have published that is relevant to your business. As the customer testimonials and two Practice Prize papers show, companies gained 10-20% sales with the same budget (L’Occitane), and double this amount by also optimizing budget size (Inofec).

2. Solving YOUR problem. Practically.

While I am not that kind of doctor, I do diagnose carefully. I don’t take the symptom for granted but ask the right questions to get to the heart of the matter. And once we agree on the problem, I commit to solving it without aiming to find new ones just to stay employed. Instead, I get you going and check in when needed.

3. Cross-functional and C-suite translation

I will join you in talking to other leaders, including your Chief Financial Officer and CEO. My modeling approach comes from economics and finance, helping you to make the profit case for better budget and allocation. As Principal Research Scientist and manager at Amazon Ads, I worked inside the company balancing marketing spend against finance scrutiny, the pandemic, and changing economic headwinds.

4. Thought leadership

Weekly updates to both my LinkedIn Newsletter “Pauwels on Marketing” and the ‘Amazon Days’ Substack you can share with other decision makers. Practical books include ‘It’s not the Size of the Data – it’s how you use it: Smarter Marketing with Analytics and Dashboards’ and ‘Break the Wall: How to Democratize Digital in Your Business’. My publications received dozens of awards, and are available for free at my website marketingandmetrics.com, organized by topic: AI, Metrics, the 4 Ps, social media, big data, responsible research, and retail media.

5. AI-native efficiency

After Amazon stopped supporting our work, I left with a colleague and founded mmmlabs.ai to streamline marketing mix modeling (MMM) and integrate it with experiments (RCTs) and multitouch attribution (MTA). AI brings us efficiency in data pipelines, quality checks, and flagging unusual patterns, while the best human experts help you make sense of what different models recommend

6. Absorbing the best latest research and practice:

As editor-in-chief of the best international journal in marketing, I have a front row seat at the latest research. For three years running, Rethink elected me as Top AI leader in retail.  Finally, I am an Advisor to the Board of the Benevolent Bandwidth Foundation, promoting AI for humanity by creating and publishing open-source AI apps.

7. CMO network across continents:

I am the cofounder and cohost of CMO Talk USA, which in the first few months already featured Teresa Barriera (Publicis-Sapient), Grace Kao (Snap) and Kipp Bodnar (Hubspot). My consulting projects in Asia, Europe and North-America gave me insights from the wonderful folks I worked with, from Amazon, FX Disney and Mars to Nissan, Spindrift and Unilever. I learned from their business expertise, including overcoming internal barriers, helping your reports adapt their workflows with AI, and demonstrating the value of marketing.

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Creating Privacy Value Through Artificial Intelligence Prompt Literacy: The Role of Self-Investment

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping how consumers and employees disclose data to digital systems. Unlike the discrete disclosure decisions examined in previous literature on privacy settings, GenAI use unfolds through interactive prompting in which users share information to cocreate outputs. This research examines how self-investment in such disclosure processes shapes perceived privacy value, defined as the perceived net value of benefits relative to privacy risks. Across four studies, we show that greater self-investment increases perceived ownership of the cocreated output; moreover, the effect of self-investment on ownership is strongest when interactions involve sensitive data disclosure, with ownership subsequently shaping privacy value through perceived benefits and privacy risks. Finally, AI prompt literacy is an actionable antecedent of self-investment: a field intervention and an online experiment show that even modest improvements in practical prompting capability can increase engagement with GenAI. The findings contribute to privacy, GenAI, and cocreation research by showing that privacy evaluations in GenAI contexts are dynamic, self-invested, and shaped by users’ ability to guide the interaction. https://msi.org/working-paper/creating-privacy-value-through-artificial-intelligence-prompt-literacy-the-role-of-self-investment/ MSI_Report_26-126

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Made with AI but why? How consumers interpret beneficiary-framed AI disclosures in advertising

As generative AI becomes more prevalent in advertising, firms increasingly face requirements to disclose AI involvement. Although prior research shows that such disclosures may generate negative consumer responses, it remains unclear whether explanatory disclosures can mitigate these effects. This research examines beneficiary-framed AI disclosures, explanations communicating why AI was used and who benefits, across three studies. In a controlled text-based experiment (Study 1), more specific explanations improve evaluations relative to minimal and less specific AI labels. However, beneficiary framing effects are not systematic, and practically negligible. Moreover, these benefits do not generalize to more realistic advertising contexts. Across two Instagram-style ad studies (Studies 2A and 2B), explanatory disclosures fail to improve consumer responses and, in some cases, lead to more negative evaluations with effects that are either statistically equivalent to zero or significantly negative. Across studies, AI aversion emerges as a robust predictor of negative responses, suggesting that disclosure effects are driven more by consumers’ prior beliefs than by the specific framing of explanations. The findings suggest caution in adding explanatory disclosures, as default inferences of firm-serving motives are difficult to override. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41270-026-00534-7 s41270-026-00534-7

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Managing the dual challenge of AI adoption: An integrative framework for employee and customer success

Despite massive investments in artificial intelligence, most pilots fail to achieve full business impact. We argue these failures stem from a critical oversight: Organizations treat employee and customer AI adoption as separate challenges rather than recognizing their interdependence. By analyzing past technology adoptions and interviewing employees and customers on current AI considerations, we identify consistent patterns where success hinges on simultaneously addressing both stakeholder groups’ needs across different implementation stages. This paper introduces an integrative framework that maps management strategies to the intersection of the Gartner Hype Cycle’s stages (Hype, Disillusionment, Enlightenment) and key stakeholders (Employees, Customers). Informed by theories of social contagion, socio-technical systems and the service-profit value chain, we distill our findings into a managerial toolkit. Our framework yields five recommendations: (1) set realistic expectations early to avoid credibility-damaging overhype; (2) invest in employee reskilling during disillusionment; (3) offer tangible customer benefits to maintain trust; (4) give employees agency in shaping AI applications; and (5) maintain competitive customer value. We demonstrate how organizations ignoring these principles experienced failures, while those applying them achieved sustainable integration. Our framework offers managers actionable guidance for navigating AI’s unique challenges. Unlike previous specialized technologies, AI broadly touches customer interactions and employee workflows simultaneously, meaning failures in one group rapidly cascade to the other. Organizations recognizing and managing these interdependencies from the outset can overcome daunting failure statistics and realize AI’s transformative potential.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S00076813260010351-s2.0-S0007681326001035-main

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Advertising’s Sequence of Effects on Consumer Mindset and Sales: A Comparison Across Brands and Product Categories

Advertising has the power to influence how consumers experience, think, and feel about brands, but the sequence of these mindset effects may differ by brand and category. This paper analyzes how the mindset factors of cognition, affect, and experience mediate advertising effects on sales, using data from 178 fast-moving consumer good brands in 18 categories over seven years. The authors compare the models proposed in the literature and conclude that the concept of sequentiality in advertising effects holds up well. Importantly, the sequence varies across brands, with the affect cognition  experience (ACE) sequence being the most common. Brand differentiation and the hedonic versus utilitarian nature of the product category moderate the incidence of the ACE sequence: this sequence is even more likely for utilitarian products and less differentiated brands. For managers, the results show that the last mindset factor in the sequence is the most important in driving sales, with cognition being most responsive to advertising among the mindset factors. Moreover, in utilitarian categories, highly differentiated brands can expect about seven times higher advertising responsiveness of affect than less differentiated brands.

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The business impact of campaign setup: Reducing media spend through frequency capping optimisation

This paper demonstrates the impact of a specific campaign setup best practice — frequency capping — on media performance, highlighting potential cost savings from optimising this setting. Focusing on this single practice, we show how its implementation can improve efficiency and reduce media waste. Analysing thousands of campaigns across DV360 and Meta, we assess whether frequency capping was enabled (compliant/non-compliant) and examine its influence on media spend and reach. An optimised XGBoost model, trained via grid search and cross-validation, estimates media spend based on delivered results. Counterfactual simulations on 500 campaigns show that enabling frequency capping can decrease media spend by 27–38 per cent without negatively impacting outcomes.1 These findings underscore the value of frequency capping as a targeted, data-driven strategy for enhancing advertising efficiency and managing budgets effectively.

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Amplifying Off-Site Purchases with On-Site Retail Media Advertising

Retail media is of growing interest to brands, and online retailers offer a large collection of product information that is freely available for consumers’ online and offline purchase decisions. In this study, the authors map webrooming across ten product categories by combining internal data from consumer browsing behavior at an online retailer and survey responses from the same customers about their offsite behavior. Moreover, they build a random forest machine-learning model to predict the mag- nitude of webrooming across categories. They find that webrooming is economically substantial. On average, for every 10 cus- tomers who research the product category on-site and buy on-site, 17 other customers research the product category on-site and buy off-site. As to retail media’s impact, upper-funnel and always-on online ad forms are associated with a higher number of online searchers in the laptop category who buy the brand offline. Beyond finding support for their propositions, the authors provide directions for future research on the cross-channel effects of retail media and how they generalize across brands, cat- egories, and retailers.

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Why and when to launch new products during a recession

Do new products launched during a recession perform better? Does the severity of the recession matter? Are products more successful when launched earlier or later in a recession? These are all questions of managerial importance that as yet remain unanswered in the extant marketing literature. The authors analyze two datasets: 1) 8,981 product launches in 20 United Kingdom fast-moving consumer goods categories over 18 years and 2) 1,071 product launches in the United States automotive market over 63 years. The results reveal products launched (a) during a recession and (b) later rather than earlier in the recession survive longer, while more severe recessions are associated with shorter survival. The same findings emerge for the dependent variables of sales and market share. This paper thus enriches marketing theory on recessions by conceptualizing and quantifying timing effects on new product launch success. For managers, the results demonstrate the benefits of countercyclical launching of new products during recessions and of marketing proactively in such economic conditions.

Talay, Pauwels and Seggie, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2023

 

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Why Brands Grow: The Power of Differentiation and Penetration

Oliver Koll and I xamine the complex relationship between consumers’ attitudes toward a brand and its market outcomes. An analysis of more than 150 brands in five countries reveals the intricate reciprocal connections between customer perceptions and behaviors, brand differentiation, and market penetration in both stable and emerging markets.

WhyBrandsGrow The Power of Differentiation and Penetration Pauwels Koen

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Practice Prize Winner: Direct mail to prospects and email to current customers? Modeling and field-testing multichannel marketing 

Multichannel retailers need to understand how to allocate marketing budgets to customer segments and online and offline sales channels.  We propose an integrated methodological approach to assess how email and direct mail effectiveness vary by channel and customer value segment. We apply this approach to an international beauty retailer in six countries and to an apparel retailer in the United States. We estimate multi-equation hierarchical linear models and find that sales responsiveness to email and direct mail varies by customer value segment. Specifically, direct mail drives customer acquisition in the offline channel, while email drives sales for both online and offline channels for current customer segments. A randomized field experiment with the beauty retailer provides causal support for the findings. The proposed reallocation of marketing resources would yield a revenue lift of 13.5% for the beauty retailer and 9.3% for the apparel retailer, compared with the 6.5% actual increase in the field experiment.

Cite as: Valenti, A., Srinivasan, S., Yildirim, G., & Pauwels, K. (2023). Direct mail to prospects and email to current customers? Modeling and field-testing multichannel marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 1-20.

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How much does digital advertising accelerate new product success?

Many new products are launched in e-commerce. While advertising is believed to enhance new product success, managers often lack the numbers to quantify this benefit to the company. Retail websites offer specific success benchmarks, such as pre-purchase product views, purchase conversion and post-purchase reviews. This paper’s main thesis is that while new products can succeed with or without advertising, digital advertising can help products achieve success faster. Across five categories, this research shows that digital advertising on Amazon.com can cut the time needed to reach success levels by more than half, compared to products that reach these same benchmarks without such advertising.

Bertozzi, Giacomo, et al. “How much does digital advertising accelerate new product success?.” Applied Marketing Analytics 7.4 (2022): 318-328.

Please access the preprint version here: How much does digital advertising accelerate new product success_pauwelspreprint

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Bias from Voluntary Disclosure of Advertising Spending: Consequences and Remedies

While advertising is a crucial marketing component, publicly listed companies possess considerable latitude in disclosing their advertising spending in financial statements. This research shows that firms opting to voluntarily disclose advertising spending differ systematically from those that do not in multiple ways. To explore the ramifications of these disparities, we use machine learning techniques to estimate undisclosed advertising spending and examine whether advertising effectiveness differs between firms with and without voluntary advertising disclosure. The results indicate that firms opting not to disclose their advertising spending realize a significantly reduced effect of advertising on customer-based brand equity. Moreover, for these firms, advertising is associated with higher systematic risk, lower firm value, and lower advertising sales elasticity. These findings suggest that advertising is less effective in product and financial markets for firms electing to keep advertising information private. Consequently, research using only voluntarily disclosed advertising likely overestimates the impact of advertising on firm value and advertising’s sales elasticity and underestimates the impact of advertising on systematic risk for the full population of advertising firms. Correcting for this bias reduces advertising’s sales elasticity and reveals that advertising does not significantly affect firms’ systematic risk.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4462446

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Bias from Voluntary Disclosure of Advertising Spending: Consequences and Remedies

While advertising is a crucial marketing component, publicly listed companies possess considerable latitude in disclosing their advertising spending in financial statements. This research shows that firms opting to voluntarily disclose advertising spending differ systematically from those that do not in multiple ways. To explore the ramifications of these disparities, we use machine learning techniques to estimate undisclosed advertising spending and examine whether advertising effectiveness differs between firms with and without voluntary advertising disclosure. The results indicate that firms opting not to disclose their advertising spending realize a significantly reduced effect of advertising on customer-based brand equity. Moreover, for these firms, advertising is associated with higher systematic risk, lower firm value, and lower advertising sales elasticity. These findings suggest that advertising is less effective in product and financial markets for firms electing to keep advertising information private. Consequently, research using only voluntarily disclosed advertising likely overestimates the impact of advertising on firm value and advertising’s sales elasticity and underestimates the impact of advertising on systematic risk for the full population of advertising firms. Correcting for this bias reduces advertising’s sales elasticity and reveals that advertising does not significantly affect firms’ systematic risk.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4462446

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Promoting Data Richness in Consumer Research: How to Develop and Evaluate Articles with Multiple Data Sources

As stated in the mission of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) (2022) and a recent editorial (Schmitt et al. 2022), JCR is a multi-disciplinary journal where consumer research provides insights about consumers and consumption in the marketplace in a way that meaningfully extends the knowledge from one of our core disciplines (e.g., psychology, sociology, economics) about a consumer-oriented construct. Unfortunately, the labels “consumer research” and “consumer behavior” have come to connote far more than the focus of the work—just as, somewhere along the way, “consumer behavior” and “quant” came to imply a particular type of data source (and associated analysis methods) that is primarily used to study theory and phenomena of interest (experiments vs. “field data”). Why this strong association between consumer-relevant questions, data, and methodology? One reason may be that the field rewards specialization. Another may be due to the incentive structure in business schools (Stremersch, Winer, and Camacho 2021). Nevertheless, the rigid lines dividing the artificially created sub-disciplines are our own making, for better and worse. One way to address this divide and consequently expand the reach of our research beyond those who specialize in our particular sub-disciplines is to use more than one type of data source when addressing a consumer research question. Such data richness is the key theme of this article.

Simon J Blanchard, Jacob Goldenberg, Koen Pauwels, David A Schweidel
Journal of Consumer Research,
Download jcr2022