Robert Palmatier

Robert W. Palmatier is the John C. Narver Endowed Chair in Business Administration and Tenured Professor of Marketing at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. He is the founder and Research Director of the SAMS Institute (Sales and Marketing Strategy Institute), a global organization linking business and academics to generate knowledge in sales and marketing strategy.

Professor Palmatier is the past Editor of both the Journal of Marketing (2018–2022) and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2015–2018) — consistently ranked among the top four highest-impact marketing journals globally. In those roles, he evaluated and made final publication decisions on thousands of peer-reviewed submissions, giving him unmatched insight into marketing research standards, methodology, and survey design.

He is ranked as the 6th most productive marketing scholar globally (2013–2022; Mithas et al. 2025), in the top 1% of all business researchers by Clarivate Analytics (multiple consecutive years), in the top 0.3% of most-cited marketing scholars by World's Top 2% Scientists (2024), and has 34,000+ citations on Google Scholar.

Prior to academia, Professor Palmatier held senior executive positions including President and COO of C&K Components ($110M global electronics firm) and European General Manager and Director of Worldwide Marketing at Tyco-Raychem Corporation. He also served as a Lieutenant in the US Navy onboard nuclear submarines — a combination of C-suite experience and world-class academic credentials rare among marketing expert witnesses.

He has testified as an expert witness in more than 15 Federal and State matters, including trials in Federal courts and the US Tax Court, providing opinions, reports, deposition testimony, and trial testimony. He serves both plaintiffs (45%) and defendants (55%). Retained by Am Law 100 firms including BraunHagey & Borden, Knobbe Martens, Kirkland & Ellis, Sidley Austin, Eversheds Sutherland, and others.

My areas of expert testimony include: trademark infringement and consumer confusion surveys (including Squirt, Eveready, secondary meaning, and association surveys); misleading advertising and misleading marketing; brand and customer relationship valuation; trade secret matters involving marketing; survey design and survey rebuttal; corrective advertising; and miscellaneous matters involving sales and marketing practices and reasonable commercial efforts. I have also been retained by the IRS Commissioner to represent the United States Government before the US Tax Court on matters involving brand valuation and marketing intangibles.

Through the SAMS Institute, Professor Palmatier has access to a network of affiliated PhD-level researchers and faculty, enabling robust research support for larger and more complex matters.