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

 

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.