I am UK Head of the Marketing & Operations Department and Associate Professor of Marketing in Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University (HWU), Edinburgh. Since joining HWU in 2023, I have served in the following roles:

• UK Head of Department: Marketing & Operations (2025-)
• Global Head of Research (illness cover): Marketing & Operations (2025)
• Member, University Senate (2025-)
• Member, University Studies Committee (2024-)
• Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) Accreditation Lead: Marketing programmes (2024-25)
• Programme Director, MSc Marketing programmes (2023-4)
• Line Manager & employing academic
• New colleague mentor (to an Associate Professor) (2024-)
• Successful probation mentor (to an Assistant Professor / Panmure House Fellow) (2024-2025)
• Member of Research Group: Centre for the Transformation of Work (& three earlier groups) (2023-)
• Member of Research Lab: Innovative Automated Systems (2024-)

Before joining academia, I accrued 18 years’ experience in senior marketing, sales and network management roles, mostly for a major motor manufacturer, where I was responsible for the commercial performance in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Northern England – a region comprising approximately 65 franchised sales and service dealerships, a population of 30 million, and a vehicle parc exceeding 18 million. I then studied a Professional Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) in the Lifelong Learning Sector, and taught CIM professional qualifications at Darlington FE College. Shortly after joining Northumbria University in 2012 as a Lecturer in Marketing, I undertook a PhD, which I completed in 2017:

• Brown, D.M. (2017). Reconceptualising internal marketing: A multistakeholder perspective. Newcastle: Northumbria University.

I subsequently became PhD Programme Director at Northumbria University (2019-23), and continue to engage with doctoral education policymakers globally to address issues of equitability and access for doctoral students – my impact in this area is the focus of my Principal Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA, awarded 27.2.2025), and informed my successful application for UK Council for Graduate Education ‘Recognised Research Supervisor’ status (2025). Reviewers of this last application called it a “rich and exceptionally student-centred application…one of the most holistic and human centred applications I have reviewed!...an outstanding application”, and commented that “David’s commitment to inclusive supervision, non-traditional students, and demystifying doctoral processes shines across all domains…We are of the opinion that his submission is exemplary and will inspire others in the field." I am now a PFHEA application mentor to HWU colleagues.

My BA(Hons) degree in History (Aberystwyth, 1994) has been the foundation of my qualitative, sociological approach to learning and research, and my industry experience underpins a passion for employability which has driven me to publish research on the benefits and limitations of business simulation games within learning and assessment strategies, and to produce two university textbooks which use pedagogical innovation to instil employability:

• Brown, D.M. (2023). Essentials of marketing: Theory and practice for a marketing career. Abingdon: Routledge. (Also currently being updated for a 2^nd edition due for publication 2026.)
• Shams, S.M.R., Brown, D.M., & Hardcastle, K. (2025). Sustainable marketing: Marketing strategy for people, planet and profit. London: Springer.

Contributions to the generation of new ideas, tools, methodologies or knowledge:

My work is unified by contributing to the theoretical and practical development of sustainability. Working predominantly with Edinburgh’s social enterprise community, I explore how entrepreneurs can innovate to broaden and deepen social impact, fulfil environmental objectives, and enhance economic capabilities.

Strand 1: This uses an internal marketing perspective to bond organisations, employees, and external stakeholders through marketized sustainability values, addressing UN SDGs 8, 9 and 12. The following article identified how a B2B ‘sustainability gap’ arises from a combination of awareness, design, communication and implementation gaps, and offered a practitioner framework to mitigate such risks:

• Brown, D.M., Apostolidis, C., Dey, B.L., Singh, P., Thrassou, A., Kretsos, L., & Babu, M.M. (2024). Sustainability starts from within: A critical analysis of internal marketing in supporting sustainable value co-creation in B2B organizations. Industrial Marketing Management, 117, 14-27.

My work in this area draws upon my reconceptualization of internal marketing from a multi-stakeholder perspective and leverages internal value co-creation and exchange to achieve externally-facing benefits:

• Brown, D.M. (2021). Internal marketing: Theories, perspectives and stakeholders. Abingdon: Routledge
• Brown, D.M. (2025) ‘How internal marketing can increase the satisfaction and retention of Generation Z employees in the banking sector’, International Journal of Bank Marketing, 43(5), 1122-1145.
• Brown, D.M., Pattinson, S., Sutherland, C., & Davies, M.A.P. (2025). Internal marketing, internal value exchange and organizational performance: A systematic review and future research agenda. Journal of Business Research, 194, 115384.

I have provided evidence based upon my research outputs to the House of Lords Committee on Home-based Learning. In this, I advised how UK Government could harness HE to upskill practitioners in internal communication strategies to maximise the benefits, and minimise the risks, of blended working upon organisational culture and community.

Strand 2: This uses Service-Dominant Logic to explore how organisations can co-create sustainable value through the appropriation of technology such as AI, addressing UN SDGs 2, 8, 9, 10, and 12. This has been applied to Bottom of Pyramid communities to alleviate malnutrition and prevent food wastage:

• Apostolidis, C., Brown, D.M., Wijetunga, D., & Kathriarachchi, E. (2021). Sustainable value co-creation at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Using mobile applications to reduce food waste and improve food security. Journal of Marketing Management, 37(9/10), 856-886.

My work examines how AI can facilitate organisational innovation, but warns against ethical pitfalls:

• Roy, S.K., Dey, B.L., Brown, D.M., Abid, A., Apostolidis, C., Christofi, M., & Tarba, S. (2025). Business model innovation through AI adaptation: The role of strategic Human Resources Management. British Journal of Management, 36(2), 546-559.
• Blaha, L., Chandarana, K., & Brown, D.M. (2025). Sociomaterial dynamics in AI and intelligent automation procurement. In M. Dabić, A. Tariq, & M. Torkkeli (Eds.). Artificial Humans – Reimagining Innovation in Industry 5.0.
• Hardcastle, K., Vorster, L. & Brown, D.M. (2025). Understanding customer responses to AI-Driven personalised journeys: Impacts on the customer experience. Journal of Advertising, 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2025.2460985

The American Academy of Advertising named this output as one of the ‘most globally influential articles’ from its five leading journals in 2025. Within the list, this article was the third most cited, had nearly twice as many reads as an other output, and had an Altmetric score over 10 times higher – this indicates that it is the dominant article in its field in terms of shares, mentions, mass media usage, flow into public policy documents, and other forms of external influence.

Even where AI and technological appropriation has not been the focus, it has permeated every aspect of my theorising around sustainable organisational culture and practices:

• Dey, B.L., Nasef, Y.T., Brown, D.M., Samuel. L., Singh, P., & Apostolidis, C. (2023). (Im)migrants’ appropriation of culture: reciprocal influence of personal and work contexts. Journal of World Business, 58(2), Feb 2023, 101417.
• Pattinson, S., Brown, D.M., & El Maalouf, N. (2025). Business model innovation and coopetition in open business models: A literature review. In A. Lindgreen (Ed.), Sage Handbook of Industrial Marketing. London: Sage (accepted for publication, Dec, 2024)
• Brown, D.M., Apostolidis, C., Singh, P., Dey, B.L., & Chelekis, J. (2022). Exploring multi-stakeholder co-creation as an entrepreneurial approach to survival and sustainability: The case of Pennine Pubs. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 14657503221145101.
• Singh, P., Brown, D.M., Chelekis, J., Apostolidis, C., & Dey, B.L. (2022). Sustainability in the beer and pub industry during the Covid-19 period: An emerging new normal. Journal of Business Research, 141, 656-672. (Included in World Health Organization COVID-19 Research Database).

Strand 3: This uses case-by-case analyses of prominent Edinburgh social enterprises and Scottish regional commercial enterprises, considering synergistic approaches which meld entrepreneurship and marketing to maximise sustainable outputs from limited resources. Such approaches constitute forms of value co-creation, and leverage strategies such as coopetition, neolocalism, bricolage, and organisational ambidexterity to address UN SDGs 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12:

• Brown, D.M. & Pattinson, S. (2025). Organisational ambidexterity and sustainable value co-creation within a social enterprise: The case of Social Bite. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14657503251320857.
• Brown, D.M. & Neyme, F. (2025). Bricolage in a social enterprise: The case of Four Square Edinburgh. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
• Apostolidis, C., Dey, B.L., Singh, P., Brown, D.M., Babu, M.M., & Kretsos, L. (2025). The role of social businesses supporting sustainable regional development: A dynamic perspective of sustainable value co-creation. Regional Studies (under review after 4^th revisions).
• Brown, D.M. & Pattinson, S. (2024). Co-creating sustainable value within a social enterprise: The case of Digital Homes Housing Association. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation,
• Brown, D.M. (2023). Managing neolocalism outside the locale in real ale and craft beer entrepreneurship: The case of Ben Lui Brewery. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation,

Additionally, I have made methodological contributions by introducing research participant usage of netnography for data and perspectival triangulation, and in my pioneering use of ambulatory interviews to adopt a mobilities perspective in management studies which naturalistically and synchronously captures the sense of place, space, movement, stasis, landscape, embodiment and self:

• Brown, D.M., Hardcastle, K., & Apostolidis, C. (2026). Consumer mobilities and place in AI-Driven personalized journeys. Academy of Marketing Science World Marketing Congress: “Exploring Marketing and Consumer Dynamics in an AI-Powered World”, University of Vilnius, Lithuania, 7th – 10th July, 2026.
• Brown, D.M., Wilson, S., & Mordue, T. (2020). Using hike-along ethnographies to explore women’s leisure experiences of Munro-bagging. Leisure Studies, 39(5), 736-750.
• Brown, D.M. & Wilson, S. (2022). Climbing the virtual mountain: A netnography of the sharing and collecting behaviours of online Munro-bagging. In A. Farmaki & N. Pappas (Eds.) Emerging Transformations in Tourism and Hospitality. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Brown, D.M. & Wilson, S. (2022). Tacit hierarchising in online communities of hillwalkers. In N. Pappas & A. Farmaki (Eds.). Tourism Dynamics: New Perspectives and Directions. Oxford: Goodfellow.

My contributions have been made possible by several grants, including HWU Confucius funding to collect data on attitudes to no/lo-alcohol drinks in China, and a Marketing Trust grant to produce a report titled ‘Overcoming barriers to the adoption of marketing simulations in Higher Education’. I also secured approximately £33k of income at Northumbria University for undertaking public perception data collection and analysis for the Tees Valley Combined Authority and Elected Mayor. I continue to pursue research funding opportunities.

Contributions to the wider research and innovation community

I am a frequent reviewer for academic journals, conferences and book publishers in the fields of marketing, entrepreneurship, business, and research methodology. By publishing research in Q1/2 journals, I have established an international reputation which has presented opportunities to contribute to research and innovation in my field in these capacities:

• Associate Editor, International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (2026-)
• Co-Chair, Academy of Marketing’s Customer Relationship Management & Services Marketing SIG (2022-)
• Steering Committee member, British Academy of Management’s Research Methodology SIG
• Organising Committee member, Academy of Marketing 2016 Annual Conference
• Guest Co-Editor: Journal of Service Marketing, Academy of Marketing Services Marketing Special Issue (2026). Editorial team: Apostolidis, C., Dey, B.L., Brown, D.M., & Shams, S.R.M.
• Principal Guest Editor of the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (2025) special issue, “Social entrepreneurship for sustainable value co-creation: Building sustainable futures”
• Grant reviewer for the Scottish Universities Insight Institute (2023, now disbanded)
• Editorial Board member, International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (2022-)
• Workshop designer/facilitator for Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) and Research Futures (2023-)
• Invited academic speaker: Centre for Consumers and Sustainable Consumption (CCSC), Durham University (12.11.2025)
• Invited academic speaker: Surplus, Waste & Excess Food in Society (SWEFS) / Culture, Health, Environment, Food & Society (CHEFS), Sheffield Hallam University (2022-)
• Invited academic speaker: British Council-funded presentation, Brunel University, London (2023)
• Designer/developer of MSc International Business & Globalisation online module, Exeter University (2022)
• Academic speaker: Business, Branding & Enterprise Research Interest Group, Northumbria University (2022)
• Executive MBA invited guest speaker & module leader: Exeter University (2021-24)
• Invited academic: Leuven University, Brussels, Belgium (2020)
• Visiting academic, Accadis Hochschule, Bad Homburg, Frankfurt, Germany (2018-20)