The discipline of marketing science is relatively young.  The application of mathematically based algorithms in marketing stem from the undisputed father of marketing science, luminary Professor John Little PhD, Chair Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Little’s contribution has been vast and unparalleled – so much so it is hard to comprehend how he has managed to be so prolific.  In a career spanning five decades, he has devised basic rules such as Little’s Law of queuing and, amongst many other things, proved that future purchasing behaviour could be predicted based on past buying patterns.  He and colleagues have pioneered various programming packages including MAXBAND, MEDIAC, ADBUDG, BRANDAID, and he is highly regarded for his work and seminal papers in areas such as decision support systems, choice models, advertising models, media models, marketing-mix models and operations research type algorithms.

And yet John Little is far from a methodology puritan.  John Little is known for ensuring that his models were always more than a rigorous mathematical algorithm; instead, he wanted managers to be able to use them.  He was attributed in 1970 as saying, “The biggest problem with management science models is that managers practically never use them.”

Professor Little’s great contribution to marketing science was celebrated at a dinner held in his honour at the 2009 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Marketing Science Conference, in Michigan, USA.  Papers were called for on topic areas in which John Little had led.

Illustrating the part that Australasia has played more recently in the development of marketing science, two of the six speakers were from Australia: AMSRS Fellow and London Business School Professor Dr. John Roberts and New Zealander and Melbourne Business School Professor Dr Peter Danaher.  John Roberts’ paper focussed on strategic marketing metrics whilst Peter’s focussed on the evolution of media models.

According to John Roberts "John Little was already an accomplished academic when he came to marketing.  He quickly took a managerial perspective to addressing problems, rather than a theory driven one.  He is best known for his work on advertising response models, marketing decision support systems and the use of scanner data to study consumer behaviour.  However, it is probably his approach that has influenced scholars, at least as much as the prodigious opus of research he produced.  I continually remind myself of John's 1970 mantra that models must be simple, robust, easy to control and communicate with, adaptive and complete with respect to important phenomena.   However, I am not sure that I hope that, like John, I am still driving in to work every day at the age of 82."

Thank you Dr John D.C. Little.  We are indeed, indebted.