Princeton Brand Econometrics (PBE) was founded in 1991 by Kent Stephan and Barry Tannenholz. A year later, Mehdi Benchekroun joined the Company after receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell University. These three individuals are the principals of PBE.

Mr. Stephan’s corporate career was spent primarily in OTC pharmaceuticals. He was the Vice President, Marketing and Sales for a leading OTC pharmaceuticals business.

Early in his career, he was a sales analyst for prescription drugs. He developed the first model to accurately predict pharmaceutical product sales at different sales force sizes. The model underwent a year of in-market testing which established its forecasting accuracy.

The experience convinced Mr. Stephan that simulation could actually work. This meant that decisions makers would no longer have to cross their fingers and hope for the best, but could instead work through different scenarios or even engineer optimal solutions before committing real money in the real world.

In the late 1980’s, he met Barry Tannenholz and saw for the first time that the possibilities were far greater and more exacting than he had imagined.

Mr. Tannenholz began his career as an advertising copywriter after being plucked from the University of California at Berkley by David Ogilvy. At the time, he had been pursuing a Ph.D. in Logic and Methodology of Science.

Mr. Tannenholz established himself as one of the premier copywriters and became the president of his own advertising agency. However, along the way, he took advantage of his access to a wealth of data to begin to disentangle and quantify the causes and effects of marketing. His work became known to clients who then commissioned him to explain issues that had long troubled them. The result was an array of models that predict consumer purchase behavior with uncanny accuracy.
His accomplishments include:

• A test market simulator with superior forecasting accuracy to the standard used by most major package goods companies. This simulator is extremely sensitive to each element of the marketing mix and will reverse engineer optimized promotional plans.
• Consumer media planning models that accurately forecast incremental business as a function of the media plan and the measured persuasiveness of the advertising. These models produce media plans that are very likely much more efficient than those coming from any ad agency.
• A share of shelf simulator that forecasts retail takeaway as a function of share of shelf, given the brand’s current market share and the category purchase cycle. This simulator was developed from a large nationwide experiment across eight different product categories.
• A methodology for building real world price elasticity curves.

Although we have completed several projects for OTC drugs and a groundbreaking price elasticity study for American Express, PBE has focused on the prescription pharmaceutical industry. Early on, PBE management made the strategic decision to undertake the R&D necessary to create simulators for the pharmaceutical industry. This intense effort has been spearheaded by Benchekroun and Tannenholz.

PBE has offices in Princeton, New Jersey and the Wall Street area of New York City.

Our employees come from diverse disciplines. They have degrees in mathematics, engineering, physics, economics and statistics. The common thread is that they are all extremely bright, fascinated by the breakthrough nature of their work and proficient at communicating with non-technical clients.