A UNSW Business School academic has been ranked 7th in the world for his contribution to the field of marketing.

“This is the best ranking I have ever had, having been in the top 10 for a while now – I’m very happy to be representing this part of the world and UNSW at that level,” Professor Harald Van Heerde said.

The Marketing Research Productivity Lists are based on the number of articles written in the top four journals over the past 10 years.

UNSW Sydney is the only Australian university to feature an academic in the top 20 positions of the list which ranks Author Productivity in the Premier Marketing Journals (2009-2018).

“Most people in the rankings are US based academics or have been trained in the US. I’ve worked in New Zealand and Australia having gained my PhD in the Netherlands, so it’s special to be a bit of an outlier in that field of mostly American colleagues,” Van Heerde said.

Social marketing

Professor Van Heerde earned his PhD at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and has attracted significant research grants for projects in the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. He also serves as the only non-US based Co-editor of the Journal of Marketing, the premier journal in the field.

“I see a lot of articles on my desk, so I can see where the field is going. Traditionally it’s been about consumers and firms but it’s now beginning to open up the scope, so it’s now becoming more about social marketing, using marketing to create a better world,” Prof Van Heerde said.

“A lot of marketing articles are about privacy concerns, sustainability, technological driven products such as mobile marketing, tracking online behaviour, big data, sharing economies (AirBnB, Uber) – these are very interesting times to be a marketeer.”

Professor Van Heerde was appointed by the Business School under the SHARP program, or Strategic Hires and Retention Pathways recruitment - a UNSW 2025 program to attract the world's best scholars to UNSW Sydney to position it as 'Australia's Global University'.

Professor Chris Styles, Dean UNSW Business School said: “He is an outstanding addition to our group of globally recognised marketing scholars."