Nick Lee is Professor of Marketing at Warwick Business School, and holds Honorary Chairs at both Aston Business School and º¬Ðß²ÝÊÓƵ Business School.
His research interests include sales management, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, research methodology, and philosophy of science.
Professor Lee is the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Marketing, the Associate Editor of the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and serves on the review panel or editorial board of several other journals.
Nick is an Honorary Fellow of, and Director of Research for, the Association of Professional Sales, who honoured him in 2016 for 'Outstanding Contribution to the Sales Profession'.
He also holds strategic advisor positions for a number of innovative sales and leadership development companies, including Datamind and Elephants Don't Forget.
In 2009 Nick was one of the youngest scholars in marketing to be appointed to a Professorship, a year in which he was also featured in The Times as 'one of the 15 scientists whose work will shape the future’.
In 2017, he was awarded an honorary life fellowship of the Academy of Marketing for outstanding lifetime achievements to research in marketing.
His research has won multiple awards, including the 2014 Darden award for Best Methodology Paper from the Academy of Marketing Science, the 2010 Joseph Lister Award Lecture for Social Science from the British Science Association, the 2005 Emerald Outstanding Special Issue Award, and the 2002 EMAC award for best doctoral work.
He is a regular speaker at international conferences on sales and methodological issues.
Nick has published over 80 articles since 2005 in peer-reviewed journals such as Organizational Research Methods, Organization Science, the Journal of Management, Human Relations, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, the Journal of Interactive Marketing, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, BMC Neurology, the American Journal of Bioethics, and the International Journal of Psychophysiology. His work has received over 4,000 citations, while also featuring in popular outlets such as The Times, the Financial Times and Forbes, and he has appeared on BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5Live, as well as on BBC Breakfast and Al Jazeera television. His first book – 'Doing Business Research' – was published by Sage in 2008, and he is the co-editor of the Marketing volume of the Wiley Encyclopaedia of Management (third Edition). His latest book – 'Business Statistics using Excel and SPSS' – was published by Sage in 2015.
Nick's work connects theories from social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, economics and philosophy, to advanced measurement and modelling methods, in order to solve important problems in sales management, professional selling, organisational psychology, social science research methodology, philosophy of science, and business ethics. His work can be classed under three main themes, each connected by an underlying desire to challenge accepted wisdom and deliver counter-intuitive knowledge which drives real change in management, policy, and social science theory and practice.
Nick completed his PhD in sales management under the supervision of Professor John Cadogan in 2003. Since then, his primary area of interest in terms of business research has been the social and individual psychology of sales management and sales force performance. Within this context, Nick focuses on both intra-individual influences (e.g. psychological influences on individual performance), and social interactions such as those between managers and salespeople (e.g. incentivisation, motivation, and personal relationships), and between salespeople and customers.
At the same time, Nick has been a strong advocate of the informed use of neuroscientific methods to examine management research questions. He has been a key thought leader in the development of the organisational cognitive neuroscience approach, of which a key aim is to integrate biological and neuroscientific models and methods with behavioural and social scientific methods in a holistic multi-level framework and methodology. Since 2007 his writing in this area and neuromarketing has broken significant new ground and is amongst the most highly cited in the area.
Since Nick's first ever publication in 2005, he has maintained a strong interest in measurement and associated issues in philosophy of science (e.g. metaphysics, scientific realism, causality). Most recently, Nick has been especially interested in unpacking the underlying assumptions of psychological measurement, and especially the implications of philosophy of mind, consciousness and neuroscientific advances for social and psychological measurement. Further, Nick has been active in working within the ongoing debate regarding formative indicator models, arguing that there are significant problems inherent to their current theory and use.
- Editor-in-Chief – European Journal of Marketing (2008 to 2018)
- Associate Editor – Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management (2017 to 2020)
- Honorary Fellow and Director of Research – Association of Professional Sales