Ethan Decker, PhD
Founder & President
Ethan is a brand strategist and marketing expert who has spent 20 years doing award-winning brand strategy, advertising, and market research for some of the world’s biggest brands.
A scientist by training but a marketer by trade, he lives in the intersection of science and creativity.
Ethan founded Applied Brand Science in 2019 because he saw so many marketers — veterans, experts, and top-level people — disagreeing about even the most basic things: how people shop, how brands compete, how ads work. For most people, marketing feels entirely subjective, and more of an art than a science. Yet there is plenty of sound science about marketing, including things that are law-like in how they work, that is virtually unknown in the world of practicing marketers.
Today, Ethan helps people understand the science of how brands grow and how advertising really works. He distills decades of research into simple, actionable principles that take the subjectivity out of marketing and give people confidence in their decisions. Ethan helps organizations around the world, of all shapes and sizes, shed marketing myths, sharpen their strategic intuition, and create brand-building work that actually drives growth.
His career includes roles as Insight Manager at Radar Research, Planning Director at 72andSunny, Group Strategy Director at Crispin Porter Bogusky, and Vice President of Insight & Strategy at the Integer Group.
He's done ethnographies in Tokyo and statistics in Matlab. He’s developed promotions scorecards and shopper marketing design principles. He's helped launch razors and position new lines of women's clothes. And he's presented on the science of marketing internationally, including SXSW and TED.
Ethan’s first life was studying urban ecology. He earned a PhD at the University of New Mexico under a National Science Foundation grant for complexity theory in biology.
He studied human evolution and urban metabolism, and he used computational models to explore patterns of urbanization. His papers continue to be cited today.
Only his friends call him Doctor Decker.
And only in jest.
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