RSSeNEWS to be determined...

Professor Andrew Ehrenberg, famous for introducing the negative binomial distribution model of buying, died in August at the age of 96.

Ehrenberg was research professor at London South Bank University until his retirement aged 80. He was elected to the RSS in 1952, was a member of Council between 1966 and 1970 and was made an honorary fellow in 2003.

Born in Germany in 1926 into a well-known academic family, he came to England with his parents in 1938, and attended Queen’s College, Taunton. Subsequently he studied statistics at Kings College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Cambridge. In 1951 he became Lecturer in Statistics at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and in 1955 moved into commercial marketing research and consulting.

His writings on statistical methodology in marketing research and wider fields soon became well-known and 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, which is now closely associated with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Research in Marketing based at the University of South Australia.

He was awarded the Gold Medal of the British Market Research Society twice, first in 1969 and again in 1996. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of South Australia.

An obituary is to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Royal Statistical Society Journal, Series A.

[source: Journal of Empirical Generalisations in Marketing Science, Vol 12, No.1, JA Bound, 'The Contribution of Andrew Ehrenberg to Social and Marketing Research']