David Dubois
Associate Professor of Marketing
INSEAD
David Dubois is a tenured associate professor of marketing at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, who works on data-driven marketing, digital consumer behavior, and luxury brands. With John Dawson and Akansh Jaiswal of the agency Jellyfish, he introduced Share of Model, a measure of how often, how prominently, and how favorably large language models surface a brand.
Share of Model at INSEAD
"LLMs are not optimizing for attention; they are optimizing for resolution," Dubois and his coauthors wrote in Harvard Business Review in June 2025. Their article, Forget What You Know About Search. Optimize Your Brand for LLMs, presented Share of Model as the AI-era companion to share of search and share of voice, tracked through mention rate, the gap between human and AI awareness, and brand sentiment.
In Italy's laundry detergent market, Ariel held almost 24% of mentions on Llama and under 1% on Gemini, while Chanteclair reached 19% on Perplexity and was missing from Llama. "There's no 'page two' on LLMs," the same authors wrote in a July 2025 follow-up for INSEAD Knowledge.
Cyborgs and High-Street Heroes
Plotting US car brands by human and AI awareness, the team sorted them into four groups. Tesla and BMW were Cyborgs, strong with both people and models; Rivian was an AI Pioneer; Lincoln and Jaguar were High-Street Heroes whose talk of elegance and heritage did little for AI visibility; and Polestar sat in the Emergent corner with low awareness on both sides. Their advice was to trade broad claims for precise, functional descriptions, such as a carbon-plated midsole for long-distance runners in place of superb running shoes.
In 2026 Dubois carried the approach into luxury with Harvard Business Review's LLMs Misunderstand Luxury Brands, written with A. R. Hess, Dawson, and Jaiswal.
From Kellogg to Fontainebleau
Dubois earned his PhD at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He grew up in France and has lived in Chicago, Illinois, as well as Japan and Singapore. At INSEAD he co-directs the Leading Digital Marketing Strategy Programme and teaches MBA electives on digital and social media strategy and on value creation in luxury and fashion.
His 2022 book, France in the eyes of Google, reads the country through locally aggregated search data alongside social, economic, and political indicators. His case writing on L'Oréal Paris and AccorHotels won the Case Centre's best marketing case awards in 2017 and 2018.