Faculty & Research

Marketing Science: John D. C. Little

Little introduced the concept of an online marketing model decades before most marketing professionals had even heard of that vast commercial environment known as the Internet. “The first online marketing model was called a Geographic Model of the Urban Automobile Market, programmed by one of our master's students and published in 1964,” he remembers.

Little was also involved in the early days of scanner data, the bar codes that appear on virtually everything sold today. In 1983, he published what turned out to be a seminal paper on the importance of scanner data to manufacturers. Using a model that he and a graduate student created, he showed how future purchasing behavior could be predicted based on past buying patterns.