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