By MSI Executive Director John Lynch

We at the Marketing Science Institute are saddened to share with you the news of the passing of Frederick E. Webster Jr., Charles Henry Jones Third Century Professor of Management, Emeritus at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Fred died in Tucson on May 24th at the age of 84.

He was MSI’s 6th Executive Director, serving from 1987 to 1989. Fred’s area of expertise was industrial and B2B marketing, and he taught and researched this subject over his distinguished career. He also studied the changing role of marketing in organizations and the evolution of its management, social and ethical issues in marketing and consumer behavior, and marketing strategy. His work was prescient, pioneering research in areas that remain of active concern for our MSI member companies.

To commemorate Fred’s many contributions to MSI and to the field of marketing, we created this Google Scholar page. You will see from perusing this page that his coauthors included a number of MSI’s past Executive Directors including John Farley, Rick Staelin, Dave Montgomery, Rohit Deshpandé, Don Lehmann, Leigh McAlister, and Kevin Keller. Fred twice received the Alpha Kappa Psi Award from the Journal of Marketing, a best paper award from the Marketing Science Institute, and the Vijay Mahajan Award from the American Marketing Association. His work has been cited in over 30,000 academic articles according to Google Scholar.

On a personal note, I was fortunate to serve with Fred in the 1990s on the advisory board of Copernicus Marketing, the consultancy founded by Kevin Clancy and Robert Schulman after they left Yankelovich, Clancy, Schulman. Fred was an insightful, funny, and warm human being.

All of us at MSI are saddened by his passing and offer our deepest sympathy to his family and his colleagues at MSI, Dartmouth, and around the world.