A renowned scholar at Fisher who has established himself as a leading marketing expert will receive one of the industry’s top academic awards.

Greg Allenby was named a recipient of a 2024 Paul D. Converse Award, which honors scholars who have made exceptional contributions to the field of marketing through research and practice. 

The award, which was established by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in 1946 and is presented by the University of Illinois’ Gies College of Business, “recognizes those whose work has not only been groundbreaking but has also had a lasting impact on the field, inspiring further research and shaping the direction of marketing scholarship and practice,” according to a release from the school. 

“I am honored to be given this award for my contributions to the science of marketing,” Allenby said. “The award recognizes scholars who have had a lasting impact on both theory and practice of marketing thought. Dr. Converse is best known for his work, “Developing the Science of Marketing” published in the Journal of Marketing in 1945. Other awards do not emphasize the practice component of what makes science great and what makes great science.”

Allenby, who holds the Helen C. Kurtz Chair in Marketing at Fisher, is a thought leader in Bayesian statistics, which seeks to harness the emergence of computational and modelling technology to conduct analyses over a wide range of marketing problems, from new product introduction to pricing, and with a wide variety of different data sources.

From 1986 through present day, Allenby has authored or co-authored 128 papers in top journals, including more than 50 that have been placed in consensus “A” journals. His research prowess has led to his consistent ranking among the top-20 most productive marketing faculty and top-10 quantitative marketing faculty in the world. That research has been cited more than 13,500 times, according to Google Scholar Citations.

His deep academic knowledge culminated in the publication of “Bayesian Statistics and Marketing,” one of two books that “describes the basic advantages of the Bayesian approach, detailing the nature of the computational revolution. The book “provides a platform for researchers in marketing to analyze their data with state-of-the-art methods and develop new models of consumer behavior.”

“Marketing is an applied discipline bordering the fields of psychology, economics, statistics and computer science,” Allenby said. “It will always be focused on real problems faced by real firms as they navigate how best to respond to real consumers. My hope is that my research will inspire others to advance the practice of marketing by testing theories from bordering disciplines and developing new theories that are grounded in practice.”

Allenby, along with Jennifer Aaker, the General Atlantic Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, will receive their awards at 21^st Paul D. Converse Marketing Symposium in May at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

The awards and symposium recognize Converse, a longtime professor of business organization and operation at the University of Illinois, which is a founding member of the AMA and housed the association as it grew into the premier professional organization for marketers, according to the school.