University of California Seal

Louis Bucklin

IN MEMORIAM

Louis P. (Pete) Bucklin

Professor of Marketing, Emeritus

UC Berkeley

1928 — 2012

 

Louis Pierre “Pete” Bucklin, a business professor at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, for more than 40 years, passed away on the morning of June 16, 2012, at the age of 83 near his home in Lafayette, CA. Pete was a real gentleman, gifted with a great sense of humor and an enthusiasm for life, a wonderful colleague and person, a conscientious and popular teacher, and a pioneer in bringing rigorous economic analysis to channels of distribution issues, an area in which he was an acknowledged world thought leader.

 

Pete, born on September 20, 1928, grew up in Mamaroneck, New York. He received an AB in business from Dartmouth College in 1950 where he wrote for the newspaper and played guard on the varsity football team. He then attended the Harvard Business School, served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, and then earned a Ph.D. in Marketing from Northwestern University in 1960. During his final year of the Ph.D. program, he was a Sloan Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Pete joined UC Berkeley’s School of Business Administration in 1960 as an assistant professor of marketing and in 1967 received tenure as an associate professor. From 1971 to 1981, Bucklin served as director of the school’s Ph.D. program and from 1981 to 1983 he was the school’s associate dean. He was a guiding light and stabilizing force in the Marketing group throughout his career and for several years, beginning in 1970, was the head of the group. He was appointed to visiting professorships at the Stockholm School of Economics in 1983, INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France in 1984, and at Erasmus University in Rotterdam in 1994.

 

As a senior faculty member, Bucklin was known to mentor assistant professors and Ph.D. students. One of his most illustrious students, Hiro Takeuchi, of Hitotsubashi University and Harvard Business School, credits Pete for inspiring him to aspire to rigor and robustness in his research and stimulating classroom discussion in his teaching. Another successful student, Sanjit Sengupta, said Pete arranged for him to travel to a conference to give a talk while still a student. Professor J. Miguel Villas-Boas remembers how Pete took him to lunch and made sure he was welcome during his first days at Berkeley, a very typical story.

 

Pete provided an important subfield of marketing, retailing and channels of distribution, with a theoretical foundation based on economic theory that it lacked before his research stream began. Several prestigious awards recognized his stream of research. He was awarded the American Marketing Association’s Paul D. Converse Award in 1986 for his significant and outstanding contribution to the theory and science in marketing. In 1993, the Journal of Marketing awarded Bucklin its Alpha Kappa Psi Award for significant contribution to the advancement of marketing practice made by his article, “Organizing Successful Co-Marketing Alliances,” co-authored with Sanjit Sengupta. This article investigated why marketing alliances succeed or fail and linked the variation to imbalances in power and management capabilities between the organizations in an alliance. In 2001, he received an honorary degree from the Stockholm School of Economics for his body of work.

 

One significant early work was a 1963 Journal of Marketing article that served to advance the 40 year old concept that products could be classified as shopping, specialty or convenience goods. He noted that if you considered how different brands were from each other and how much information uncertainty consumers had about the brands, the classification scheme now would have a theoretical structure and there would be an ability to explain and predict that was heretofore lacking. Pete was modest and had a great sense of humor. He noted in his Converse paper in respect to his classification theory that “undergrads were not sympathetic to my initial thinking on the topic.”

 

Another landmark early work was his 1966 monograph called “A Theory of Distribution Channel Structure.” It presented a general framework for the analysis of business networks and distribution systems which explained how channel structures evolve. The book highlighted the importance of considering the different types of functions carried out in a channel of distribution, and the costs of performing these functions with different patterns of organization in a channel. He noted that the overall costs depend on scale economies, interaction effects among activities, and incentives of the different economic agents. Lou Stern, the “other” prominent academic expert on channels, who had a behavioral rather than economic perspective, said that “this book was perhaps the most seminal work on channels ever written.”

 

A follow-on 1972 book “Competition and Evolution in the Distributive Trades” was termed by Shelby Hunt, the foremost marketing theory writer, as “one of the finest books ever written in the channels of distribution area.” Shelby also opined that Pete was an “outstanding marketing scholar,” and called his work on channels of distribution “insightful and path-breaking.”

 

Pete was an involved, supportive colleague. Active in weekly seminars, his comments, like his research and writing, were always rigorous, fresh, and clear. His questions drew out the assumptions and implications of the topic at hand but always in a supportive and collegial way. They were always on target and got everyone to perk up. He could get animated about positions which were usually solid. Lou Stern told about a typical conversation he had with Pete where “he was so tenacious and intelligent that I would have to back down and slink away.” He went on to say that “no matter how much we disagreed our affection for one another never wavered.”

             

After retiring from the Haas School of Business in 1993, Pete continued teaching various marketing courses as a professor emeritus until spring 2001. In 1998, students in the full-time MBA program honored Bucklin with the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching.

 

Bucklin adored his family and friends. He also had an enormous appreciation for the outdoors, exploring the world, and photography. When on a family outing he frequently was heard to say things like “I am blessed to have such an exceptional family” and “the trip was marvelous.”

 

In 1956 he married Weylene Edwards of Milledgeville, Georgia. Sharing a love for travel, literature, art and academia, they remained happily so for more than 50 years until Weylene's passing in 2007. They initially lived in Evanston, IL, moved to Berkeley in 1960, started a family, and then settled in Lafayette in 1974. In Lafayette, both Pete and Weylene became active in civic affairs. He served as a member of the Lafayette Planning Commission from 1991 to 1993 and most recently served on the board of trustees of Planned Parenthood Shasta Pacific.

 

Weylene and Pete together raised two children both of whom had professional links to Pete’s career. Rhonda Bucklin of Menlo Park graduated from the Haas School’s full-time MBA program in 1993, the same year that Pete retired. Randolph E. Bucklin of Manhattan Beach, CA followed Pete’s career and became a prominent Professor of Marketing and the Peter W. Mullin Chair in Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. In addition to his two children, Bucklin is survived by grandchildren Laura, Marie, and Peter Bucklin of Manhattan Beach and Kyle and Ella Hartmanis of Menlo Park plus a sister, Marietta Huggard, in Florida, and a brother, Michael Bucklin, in Virginia.

 

Raymond Miles, the dean of the Haas School from 1982 to 1990, said that “we have been blessed with many fine colleagues, but few with Pete’s great smile, dedication, and warmth.”

 

His colleagues as well as friends and family treasure their times and association with him. He was a true friend and stimulating, supportive companion.

 

David Aaker, Emeritus

Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley