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Encourages students to think outside the box.
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About Damien
Dr Damien Mather is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the Otago Business School, University of Otago. He holds a BE in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Canterbury and a PhD from the University of Otago. His career includes roles as an electronic engineer at the Post Office and Telecom, predictive modeller for a market research company, marketing scientist at Colmar Brunton analysing market research and modelling consumer behaviour, strategy and marketing positions at Telecom, senior roles at Vodafone New Zealand, leadership in Australian market research companies, founder of his own marketing research consultancy, and lecturing positions at the University of Otago, culminating in his current academic appointment.
Mather's research examines decision-making processes impacting national, regional, and global markets, employing corpus linguistics text analytics, data mining, advanced quantitative methods, empirical generalisations, and studies of consumer behaviour, heuristic decisions, decision framing, and uncertainty. His work advances marketing knowledge in branding, pricing, and corporate communications. As co-investigator, he contributes to a NZD10M MBIE-funded project on rapidly evolving climate-smart dairy cattle; he led a NZD254K subcontract as PI on market acceptance of climate-smart dairy milk; and participated in projects on moral foundations of university students (NZD20K) and food safety risks (NZD33K). Boasting an h-index of 23, his top 10 publications have 1,335 citations, published in Nature Biotechnology, Appetite, and Journal of Travel Research. Select recent works include: Alinasab, J., Mather, D., Parackal, M., & Briamonte, F. (2026). Effectuation in action: How pre-commitments drive international performance. International Entrepreneurship & Management Journal, 22, 8; Nind, J. et al. (2025). The development of a discrete choice experiment: Investigating pharmacy selection in New Zealand. Health Policy, 153, 105245; Nind, J. et al. (2024). The effects of free prescriptions on community pharmacy selection: A discrete choice experiment. Research in Social & Administrative Pharmacy, 20, 1089-1095. He has given invited presentations in New Zealand and at universities in the US, Norway, Germany, and China. Mather is affiliated with the Food Waste Innovation research theme, New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre, and Ag@Otago; he acts as a delegated Human Ethics Committee approver, outbound student exchange adviser, and member of the department's Teaching and Learning Team.