The Humble Scholar: Learning with and from Marnik Dekimpe

Written by Finn Höner, PhD Candidate in Quantitative Marketing at the Erasmus School of Economics A chance hallway conversation between newly minted PhD student Marnik Dekimpe and marketing professor Pierre Vanden Abeele at KU Leuven stopped Marnik Dekimpe in his tracks: marketing researchers were using econometrics to understand consumers. For Dekimpe, having a background in commercial engineering and informatics, this revelation opened a new world: “Marketing is more than just abstract frameworks and there is data to be used, there’s econometric models to be used,” he recalls. Marketing revealed itself to be more than “four Ps and SWOT analysis”, in fact a discipline where rigorous quantitative methods meet real-world business problems—a combination that would define Dekimpe’s distinguished career spanning an honorary doctorate, multiple best-paper awards, and transformative contributions to marketing research.

From reluctant programmer to one of marketing’s econometrics pioneers

Dekimpe’s path to becoming one of marketing’s most cited scholars was anything but linear. His informatics background contained an unfortunate flaw: he didn’t enjoy programming. What he did love was econometrics. This hallway chat, in his words “a revelation”, meant he could pursue his passion for data analysis while studying something with immediate practical relevance.

In the 90s, academic marketing departments in Europe were tiny with a limited range of research opportunities. For someone seeking extensive training in quantitative marketing, the path led Marnik Dekimpe from KU Leuven in Belgium to UCLA in the United States and there to a research tradition of data-driven inquiry.

Research streams from real-world tensions

What makes research truly compelling? For Dekimpe, the answer lies in starting where practitioners disagree vehemently. “I always find it interesting to start with something that’s happening and attracts considerable attention in the real world,” he explains, and adds with a smirk: “reviewers would not be able to say that it was not interesting.” His research on recession marketing exemplifies this philosophy perfectly: During the financial crisis, business reports and consulting recommendations contradicted each other wildly—some advocated cutting advertising budgets to preserve cash, others argued for maintaining or even increasing spending to capture market share. These competing viewpoints, each with seemingly sound logic, created a perfect research opportunity.

But Dekimpe doesn’t stop at single studies. He thinks in research streams, envisioning how one paper can spawn multiple follow-up investigations before the first manuscript is even published. His work on recessions shows this approach: Here he has studied, for example, the role of private labels, companies’ spending on advertising, and the effectiveness of price changes at different stages of the business cycle. These papers build on each other, providing different viewpoints on marketing problems over the business cycle. Together such research streams form a collection, that is more insightful than the individual parts on their own.

Broadening horizons through editing

Serving as editor-in-chief of IJRM transformed Dekimpe’s research perspective unexpectedly. On his research view before taking the editorial role, he admits that: “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And for example, I was doing a lot of work in time series analysis and then everything seem[ed] like a time series problem.” The editorial chair forced him beyond this methodological comfort zone. Suddenly he was reading strategy papers, consumer behavior manuscripts, and research using methods far removed from his home in time-series analysis.

“Being an editor, definitely for a journal like IJRM, really broadens your perspective,” Dekimpe reflects. “You start to remember things that you have seen.” This exposure to marketing’s full methodological and substantive diversity enriched his own research agenda and taught him a crucial lesson in intellectual humility: recognizing when others know more than you do. The editorial experience also honed a critical skill: rapid paper assessment. “You learned to very quickly discern, is there something in a paper or not,” he explains. “You can detect if there a nugget in there.”

“You can detect if there is a nugget in there.”

-Marnik Dekimpe

Marketing’s superpower: disciplinary openness

Ask Dekimpe what single concept from marketing he would preserve if he could keep only one, and his answer reveals what he values most about the discipline: “What I really like about marketing is that you are not very dogmatic. We approach problems from multiple angles.” This openness to borrow from disciplines such as psychology or computer science, distinguishes marketing from more insular fields. Marketing researchers actively seek out diversity, recognizing that complex business problems rarely submit to single-discipline solutions. This intellectual permeability manifests throughout Dekimpe’s career, drawing inspiration from criminology and sociology research methods, for example hazard models, has enriched his marketing research while addressing socially important topics.

The human side of scholarship

Despite his impressive credentials—honorary doctorate, EMAC Distinguished Scholar Award, numerous best-paper prizes (4 at IJRM alone!) Dekimpe remains remarkably grounded. When asked which researcher he would most like to meet for lunch, he says that he would like to meet Nobel laureates Merton Miller and Eugene Fama again. What he admires most about these giants of the finance field was “[…] how humble they both stayed, even though their citation numbers are much higher than what I can ever dream of,” he reflects. This emphasis on humility despite extraordinary achievement reveals Dekimpe’s own values and approach to scholarship.

Advice for the next generation

For emerging scholars, Dekimpe emphasizes engaging early with the editorial process, noting that IJRM’s approach of involving junior scholars and providing feedback on reviews accelerates development. He urges scholars to embrace marketing’s openness while remaining grounded in rigorous science, arguing that those who thrive will be the ones who use new tools, data, and methods, while keeping in touch with the real consumer and her behavior.

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Meet Marnik Dekimpe

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Marnik Dekimpe’s current research explores, among other topics, recession marketing, the impact of product-harm crises, and drivers of private-label success. He is Research Professor of Marketing at Tilburg University (Netherlands) and Professor of Marketing at KU Leuven (Belgium). In 2018, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg and the EMAC Distinguished Scholar Award for lifetime contributions to marketing research. He served as editor-in-chief of IJRM from 2010-2012.Cumulatively, he has served more than 3 decades as Associate Editor of, among others, IJRM, JM, JMR, JAMS and the Journal of Retailing.