EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award 2023 for Els Gijsbrechts

Professor Els Gijsbrechts

Els Gijsbrechts is Professor of Marketing at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Before her position at Tilburg University, she was on the faculty of University of Antwerp and the Catholic University Leuven (both in Belgium). Els Gijsbrechts is a leading voice in retailing research globally. In her research, she focuses on modeling consumers' grocery shopping behavior and consumer responses to retailer and manufacturer decisions. As such, she explored phenomena like stockouts, shelf-layout and assortment changes, price (promotions), and retail branding. More recently, she is looking into the impact of digital evolutions on grocery shopping behavior. To that extent, she mostly relies on choice models whereby consumer heterogeneity takes the front stage on several levels of decision-making (store, product category and brand). Her work has been published in journals such as IJRM, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Management Science and Marketing Science. Her work was awarded several times, including with the IJRM best paper award, and is often cited (>4,000 times according to Google scholar).

Professor Gijsbrechts has a solid and extensive legacy as an educator. She co-authored often with doctoral students and junior faculty and was on the dissertation committee of 47 students (11 as dissertation chair). She taught courses on topics such as Strategic Marketing Management, Academic Skills in Marketing, and Marketing Research at the undergraduate level, and Quantitative Models in Marketing, Introduction to Research in Marketing, and Marketing Theory at the Master level.

Professor Gijsbrechts has been a major contributor to EMAC in several ways. She was elected EMAC Fellow in 2022. She was a national representative (Belgium) 1996-2002. She was also on the EMAC Doctoral Colloquium in 2020, 2021 and 2022. And she has been a frequent contributor to IJRM (EMAC’s flagship journal) as an author (19 papers) and a review board member (as an AE since 2014). She was also a founding member of the EMAC Retailing Special Interest Group.

Given her innovative and leading research, her substantial contributions to EMAC, along with her exceptional service to the marketing community at large, Professor Els Gijsbrechts fully merits the EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award.

The Award Committee consisted of Eitan Muller, Stefan Stremersch (Chair) and Gerrit Van Bruggen. The award committee was unanimous in its decision.