John Roberts has a Ph.D. and M.Sc. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Commerce and honours Arts degree from the University of Melbourne. He played Intervarsity Rugby for the University of Melbourne; was Convenor of Australian University Chess; served as National President of the Australian Liberal Students Federation; and was a Pilot Officer in the Victorian University Squadron of the RAAF. He is a Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales and a Fellow of the London Business School and Fudan University Institute for Sustainable Innovation and Growth.

John has thirteen years senior management experience as a market research manager, marketing operations manager, and marketing director.  He has extensive consulting and executive coaching experience and the company that he founded, Marketing Insights Pty Ltd, became a regional leader in marketing strategy advice.  It is now a part of Nielsen Research.  John has consulted for many diverse international companies including IBM, Unilever, Buick Motors, BMW, MobiCom, and QANTAS.  He undertook the internal brand analysis for Accenture on a worldwide basis from 1998 to 2008. He was an Academic Trustee of the Marketing Science Institute; the world’s top international industry-academic liaison body (based in Cambridge, Ma.) and he sits on the Advisory Boards of the Chief Marketing Officer Council (in Palo Alto), Harvard Business Review (in Boston), the Brand Management Institute (in Hamburg), and the Centre for Advanced International Marketing (in Tilburg).

John has won the American Marketing Association’s John A. Howard Award for the top Doctorate in the U.S., its William O’Dell Award for the most influential research published in the Journal of Marketing Research published five years previously, and its Advanced Research Techniques Forum Best Paper Award.  He has been a finalist in the Society for Marketing Science John Little Award for the top marketing science paper three times and Runner-Up in its Gary Lilien Marketing Practice Award three times.  In 2018, John was awarded the Society’s Buck Weaver Award for lifetime contributions to the Theory and Practice of Marketing Science. John sat on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Forecasting, Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Australian Journal of Management each for over 25 years. He is winner of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Marketing Distinguished Researcher and Distinguished Educator Awards, as well as winning its Best Paper Award three times. 

John was Visiting Professor at Stanford University from 1995 to 2002, Professor of Marketing at the London Business School from 2003 to 2014 and ANU from 2009 to 2013.  He has been Visiting Professor at M.I.T., University of Hamburg, Indian School of Business and HKUST.  At the Australian Graduate School of Management, he has received the Distinguished Teacher and Distinguished Researcher Awards. At the London Business School, he was Runner Up in the Best Teacher Award.  John is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, the Royal Society of New South Wales, Research Society of Australia, Australian Marketing Institute, and Australia and New Zealand Academy of Marketing.  In 2011, he was awarded the Australian Marketing Institute’s Sir Charles McGrath Award, for lifetime contributions to marketing, the only academic so honoured. In 2023, John was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the King Charles III Inaugural Birthday Honours list.