For over half a century, he made contributions to data reduction/analysis and presentation, and to understanding buyer behaviour and how advertising works.

Ehrenberg held the rare distinction of having been awarded the Gold Medal of the British Market Research Society twice, first in 1969 and again in 1996.

An early interest in social science applications of statistics had already begun to show through in Cambridge (such as extensive experiments into the reliability of trained taste-testers for quality assessments and into price subsidies in the food industry).

Also developed were two early aversions, the first to multivariate techniques imposed on simple data, and the second to mathematics for its own sake in applied statistics.

[5] The summary stated baldly: A result can be regarded as routinely predictable when it has recurred consistently under a known range of different conditions.

Ehrenberg has answered these criticisms by pointing to the absence of published and widely used models generated by conventional techniques.

Another criticism is that Ehrenberg's published models deal with relationships between the averages of groups, and thus ignore variability between individuals.

In the early 1980s, with Gerald Goodhardt and Chris Chatfield, he extended the NBD model to account for brand choices.

The generalisation to the multi-brand case was put forward in "The Dirichlet: A Comprehensive Model of Buying behaviour" [7] and was read to the Royal Statistical Society.

'The Dirichlet', as it became known, accounts for a number of empirical generalisations, including Double Jeopardy, the Duplication of Purchase law, and Natural Monopoly.

It maintains that much of the approach to research methods and prediction depends on finding patterns in data and this is much aided by its presentation in simple tables.

This work has had a major effect in on the way data are presented in academia, commerce but less in the British public sector.

There the layout of the official British Monthly Digest of Statistics under Sir Harry Campion antedated Ehrenberg by many years, but set a pattern in many ways the same.