Teaching the Human in the Loop: Why AI Can’t Replace Curiosity and Storytelling

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Description

In this episode of The Curiosity Current, hosts Stephanie and Tiffany talk with Marcus Cunha Jr., Robert O. Arnold Professor of Marketing and Director of the Master of Marketing Research program at the University of Georgia, about preparing the next generation of insights leaders. Drawing on real-world projects with companies like UPS and Coca-Cola, Marcus explains how the program blends academic rigor with practical experience to ensure students learn to connect insights to ROI and business impact. He shares how AI and automation are reshaping skill requirements, why curiosity, adaptability, and storytelling remain irreplaceable, and how alumni continue to rise into leadership roles across the industry. The discussion also touches on his research into how popularity shapes perceptions of expertise and how color saturation influences consumer judgments of product potency. It’s both a window into how one of the most respected programs in the field is evolving and a practical guide for turning research into a driver of strategy rather than just a source of data.

Marcus - 00:00:01:

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Stay curious. Try to learn. Ask questions, why things are happening the way they are happening. Build a range from technical skills to soft skills that help to influence people. And just don't deliver research, deliver a perspective.

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Stephanie - 00:00:19:

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Welcome to The Curiosity Current, the podcast where we dive deep into what’s shaping today’s trends and tomorrow’s consumers. I am your host, Stephanie and I am so glad you’re joining me. Each episode, we tap into the minds of researchers, innovators and insight professionals to explore how curiosity drives discovery and how discovery drives better decisions in an ever-changing market landscape. Whether you are data enthusiast, a strategy pro, or like me, just endlessly fascinated by human behaviour, this is the place for you. So, get ready to challenge your assumptions, spark some fresh thinking and have some fun along the way. Let’s see where curiosity takes us next with this brand new episode.

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Stephanie - 00:01:05:

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Welcome back to The Curiosity Current. Today, I'm joined on the hosting side by my colleague, Tiffany Mullen, who is AYTM's VP of growth operations and also produces this podcast. Welcome, Tiffany.

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Tiffany - 00:01:18:

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Thank you. I am excited to be on this side of the mic today.

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Stephanie - 00:01:22:

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We're excited to have you and also excited to have today's guest. Our guest today is Marcus Cunha Jr., the Robert O Arnold, Professor of Marketing at the University of Georgia and the Director of UGA's master of marketing research program. This is a program that has been shaping the next generation of insights professionals for over four decades. Here at AYTM, we've had the incredible opportunity to collaborate with Marcus in the UGA MMR program over the past few years, helping students bring real world research experiences to life using the AYTM platform. Marcus has spent his career at the intersection of academia and practice, studying cognition, judgment, and decision making in the consumer context. He's worked with multinational corporations in the US and Brazil, teaching everything from statistical analysis to media effectiveness and helping research executives translate data into actionable business insights. In this episode today, we're going to explore how marketing research education is evolving in a world of AI, automation, and rapidly changing consumer behavior. We're gonna dig into the skills the next generation of insights professionals need to thrive and what it takes to prepare students not just to analyze data, but to shape strategy and drive impact. Marcus, welcome to the show.

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Marcus - 00:02:43:

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Oh, thank you. Thank you very much for having me both, you and Tiffany. It's a pleasure to be back on the AYTM podcast.

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Tiffany - 00:02:49:

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Nice. Yeah. Excited to have you.

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Stephanie - 00:02:52:

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So, Marcus, a lot of times how we like to start out on the podcast is to really just talk a little bit about your career journey. You know, you've obviously had a remarkable journey spanning academia, consulting, and, of course, leadership, um, at the UGA MMR program. Can you just walk us through how you became interested in marketing first, right, and then ended up pursuing a PhD and doing academic research, and then ultimately landing in also this leadership position where you're really shaping this graduate program curriculum and the future of our insights professionals.

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Marcus - 00:03:25:

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Wow. I might take the whole podcast time. I'm old. I think it's a very fun and hopefully inspiring story. So, it all started like, actually my dad was exactly our marketing and sales executive for Alcoa, the American-London company in Brazil. So, I once picked up one of his marketing books, it would happen to be Philip Kotler's marketing book, and they started reading about the four P’s and it's like, wow, people really plan all these things they sell to us. And so it became really interesting for them there. So then, in my undergrad, in business in Brazil as well, I majored in marketing, but I always loved the more quantitative portion of marketing, even the finance courses. I was probably one of the few students that loved the marketing research course. With most students, it's like, that's a course I have to take to graduate? And then, from there, I became like an undergraduate research assistant to a faculty that had just come back from his doctor degree in France. And that's a really interesting connection to marketing research. He was actually an information systems professor, but he was doing a project in marketing intelligence systems and I was part of his grant, and his adviser in France had actually developed a software for marketing research, which is actually very popular in Europe and now in Brazil and South America, it's called Sphinx - they have over 50,000 clients around the world and his adviser actually offered this faculty to distribute the software in Brazil. And then he was, like, busy with his faculty activities and had just come back after five years living away, so, he didn’t know many people. So, he invited me and said, let's start this company and see where it goes. We started this company distributing this software, and it became really successful in Brazil because it was very user friendly relative to the tools that were available in the mid-nineties. While I was doing that, I also did my master's in Brazil, more from an academic standpoint, you know, like an MBA. And that's when I really got interested in pursuing a career in academia and then I decided to sell my part in the company, my effort in the company to him and move to the US to do my PhD at the University of Florida. So, academic research marketing can easily be divided in three areas - marketing modeling, marketing strategy, and consumer behavior. Right? So the first two are what we refer to in the field as the people who study the hunter, the companies that are hunting for the bear, which is the consumer.

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Tiffany - 00:06:10:

Gotcha.

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Marcus - 00:06:11:

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So, the people that do consumer behavior, they're more interested in the bear; why the bear eats the way they eat, their patterns, and how we can protect them to some extent from the hunter, and all that. So when I think about people that are interested in marketing research, ultimately, they're interested in understanding behavior and that's why my area of interest began there. So from there, I was recruited to the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle, where I was there for eight years and then UGA recruited me and I think to some extent, it was because of my roots in marketing research, distributing that software and training because you sell those softwares, you do the demo, people love it, but they don't know how to use it. Then you have to sell the training. Right? So I trained many researchers in Brazil and South America. I moved to UGA, and then I started teaching the MMI program. I love the program and in 2017, I became the director of the program. So hopefully, that wasn't too long of a story.

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Stephanie - 00:07:12:

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Not at all. I love how it all, kind of, led to where you are. I'm curious now that this is really where you sit. What is the most rewarding part of working with the next generation of insights professionals for you?

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Marcus - 00:07:24:

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Yeah. There's a lot of things that, like, excites me about it. So, I think the first thing is, like, seeing every year this group of really talented, but “raw talent" students joining the program, and seeing over eleven months how they evolve to become professionals ready to start their career. It's very interesting to me. On their first day of orientation, there's some anxiety, social anxiety, and there are many of 29 other students, there are many faculty and staff and then in their mind, they don't know where their junior is going to go but I know exactly where they're gonna be eleven months from now. They come from, like, I don't know who I'm sitting next to. I know you're gonna be best friends by the end of eleven months. Some of them become friends for life, who have been MMRs that, you know, graduated thirty years ago. They still do their girls' trips.

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Stephanie - 00:08:17:

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I love that.

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Marcus - 00:08:21:

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So I know and I see that every year because exactly four weeks after graduation, the new class arrives, so, I know exactly what to expect, but they don’t, so I love that. Another thing that I really like to see is the alumni success. You know, as a faculty, a lot of times, you teach students. I teach MBAs and MMRs, I taught undergrads in my past. You teach them, maybe if they link to you on LinkedIn, you will know what's going on a little bit with their professional life but with MMR, they become part of a family. So, we follow their progression. We see them through our future of insights, certainly. They come to speak to my class. I mean, we just had the future of insights summit in Atlanta and students of mine of, like, seven to ten years ago are now directors and vice presidents suppliers and clients. The students that were my babysitters, now they have two kids, and they're a partner of a major supplier. So, I really I've seen not only their career progression, but their life progression. Now they come, like, tell me how much the MMR program has changed their lives. One more thing that I think that's mostly for my own interest is that I really like recruiting students to the program. I feel like Kurby Smart, the coach for the Universal Georgia football team, like, I need this player to be my team. And I especially love when they think they wanna go to another program and they flip them.

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Stephanie - 00:09:53:

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I love that. It's gotta feel good. Yeah.

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Marcus - 00:09:56:

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Yes. I don't know if I have time for a little story, but one that comes to my mind was a student. She's now a director of research at UCB, a major pharmaceutical company. But she had an offer from us and she had an offer for another master's of marketing program from a private school that they like to call themselves the Harvard of the South. And then I knew she was leaning towards that university, and she came to visit both. She was gonna visit this university, and it's like, well, since you're going back to Florida, let's talk in Athens and take a look at the program. And then it was spring break week, and I said, like, okay. “Yeah. No. We'll go through. I'll take you off to lunch”. And I asked, are there any students in town that are interested in taking this student to lunch and taking her on a tour of Athens and the campus and the MMR program. They said, of course, four or five students joined me and then they did the tour, they left. So, her parents were driving her to visit the universities and then she left. A week later, she accepted our admission and then exactly like one year later at graduation, her parents came. She talked to me and said, I don't know what magic you work, she was sad to accept the other offer. As soon as she got in the car, she said, I'm coming to the DOGA MMR program. And I talked to her, it's like, so, what changed your mind and she’s like, if it is a program that the director makes the time to come and talk to me, and the students were in spring break, are excited to come and do it, that's the place where I wanna be. And I just love stories like that. It's building that culture that the students that always wanna be connected and come back.

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Tiffany - 00:11:38:

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Yeah. And we can attest to the amount of students that come out of UGA and the programs over there that make their way even as employees at AYTM that, you know, just talk about how incredible the programs are over there. So, that noise definitely makes its way into the industry in general for sure.

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Marcus - 00:11:54:

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I love that.

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Stephanie - 00:11:55:

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So, I didn't know that you were local to Florida. I was listening to your bear reference earlier, and then you mentioned University of Florida. I was wondering why you didn't pick a gator for that one.

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Marcus - 00:12:04:

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I know. Right? We don't wanna kill the gators.

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Stephanie - 00:12:11:

I agree.

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Tiffany - 00:12:34:

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Yeah. Exactly. Awesome. Well, you bring such an interesting background from both academia and real world consulting experience to the table. I'm curious when you think about that mix, how it's shaped the way that you've built the MMR program at UGA, and what real world lessons do you think that the students really need the most before they start jumping into the industry that you're infusing into the curriculum over there?

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Marcus - 00:12:47:

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I think my academic background pushes me to emphasize rigor, critical thinking and strong methodological grounding because publishing academic papers is a grueling process. Queue-review process is a grueling process, you need to kinda anticipate for reviewers, what kind of holes they're gonna poke on your research before you submit that paper, so I think that's a part of it. My consulting experience, I think, brings value to trying to make students understand that if you do research that does not influence a decision, you're just creating costs to come. So, we build the program around certain things like academic rigor, but also, like, how we can influence decisions in a way that companies can perform better, consumers can receive better products and service. We also emphasize a lot, and you guys know that, we use a lot of AYTM for that, real life projects, with corporate partners. And a lot of our class projects are more focused on real datasets, real problem-solving rather than tests. Very few of our classes have exams. There's not much value for our graduate students in a program that's designed to produce professionals to go to an interview and say, I studied twelve hours for that test.

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Stephanie - 00:13:59:

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Right. I have so much conceptual knowledge. Yeah.

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Marcus - 00:13:59:

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Yeah. But they can say, like, hey, I did this project, and I thought it was gonna go this way, x, y, and z, and I face these bumps on the road, and this is how we figure out how to address the disease. So, that's how we approach the rigor with the practice in the program.

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Tiffany - 00:14:16:

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That's great. I'm gonna jump ahead here on a question because I think it's super relevant here. When you're thinking about striking that balance between teaching the academic foundations and really getting students ready to drive those major business decisions in the real world, you talked about some of those projects or hands-on exercises that you found really helped them turn that theory into action. Are there any specific stories or examples of types of things that you're doing, in your environment to kind of bridge that gap?

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Marcus - 00:14:45:

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I can talk about some corporate projects that I mentor. We've done a corporate project for UPS, I think, about three years ago, which was segmenting that small and medium business, which a lot of times companies come to the table to this project thinking like, it's our relationship with universities. We're helping the students but we actually did a segmentation that they implemented as their national segmentation.

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Stephanie - 00:15: 10:

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Nice. Yeah. For the UPS segmentation. Nice

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Marcus - 00:15:15:

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Yes. And I know you guys had that podcast with Sarah Montgomery recently from Coca Cola. She's one of our alums. She's been our contact for the Coca Cola projects in the past three years, and we also did two segmentations and typing tools for two other product lines that they are using right now.

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Tiffany - 00:15:35:

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That's incredible.

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Marcus - 00:15:37:

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So, it’s really, like, it’s not just a class project. It's really impacting companies, and the students really see the impact that they cause.

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Stephanie - 00:15:44:

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I have a question just to continue along in this vein but maybe from a slightly different lens. So, a pattern that has been coming up in the podcast with some of our other guests, particularly those that work at brands like we were just talking about. This trend is that more and more often, we are seeing that consumer insights functions have a seat at the table. Researchers are expected to have a point of view and influence strategy rather than simply report the news, which I will say when I first entered the industry, particularly on the supplier side. It could feel like that sometimes, I'm here to be a truth teller. And, like, that's not inherently bad, but it's like, you shouldn't just be a truth teller. There's more beyond that. And it's been really interesting to hear that the expectations even within companies are different. We're not having to, like, knock down those walls and invite ourselves in, but that there's more invitation from the c suite to be part of those decisions. Are you seeing similar trends? And do you feel like a lot of the way that you prepare students then, is kind of focused on being part of business strategy and those conversations that push the business forward and outcomes that can be measured rather than executional prowess prowess only.

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Marcus - 00:16:54:

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Definitely. We teach them the methods and the analysis, and they say, okay. So the test statistics’ significant, but so what? Or or even then, like, okay, significant is? Let's say, concept A is better than the current concept that we have. Okay? But how costly will it be to implement the concept? Like, what's the marginal gain that we're gonna have there? Might be strategically significant, but might not make sense from a business standpoint. So, you're probably familiar with that joke, it goes like this, “there's a guy lost on a hot air balloon, and then, like, he's a CMO of a company, and he asked a guy on the ground, say, do you know where I am? He's like, oh, yeah. Your latitude is X. Your longitude is Y. Your altitude is A and this and that and then the CMO says, you must be a research analyst. And he says, how do you know? It’s because you gave me all this information that's correct, and I still don't know where I am.”

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Stephanie - 00:17:50:

Right. Yeah. That's the danger. Right? Yes.

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Marcus - 00:17:56:

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Yes. So that's the thing we are really emphasizing. We do have methods courses, but we emphasize a lot the delivery of persuasive insights that will help people to make decisions. Because otherwise, research that stays on a hard drive is a cost. If you become a cost center, you're gonna be the first one to go when things are not going well. So time insights to ROI. It's a challenge but that's what needs to be done. Because CFOs are the ones that are gonna approve budgets and if we cannot talk to a CFO about the ROI, it's gonna be harder for you to grow your influence in the company.

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Stephanie - 00:18:40:

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For sure. I think especially researchers get caught up in wanting to, like, oh, I need to prove ROI. Well, I worked in especially quantitative researchers feeling like they need very exact strong data. ROI, we can use some back of the envelope map. You know what? It's okay. Right? So you might not have every piece of data that you need to make the most compelling story, but I guarantee you there's data that proves your value. And it's not gonna be a perfect dataset, but it never is.

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Marcus - 00:19:07:

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And I said, like, sometimes, the impact is long term. When you are changing the brand in the position, you're not gonna see results in a quarter. It’ll take years. But you need to be able to show the impact of the research. Even if it's not in more money now, you can show the attitudes toward the brand have changed slightly. And that eventually, will come down the funnel converted into sales.

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Tiffany - 00:19:35:

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Yeah. Definitely. When you think about the broader academia set, right? All the programs that sort of exist throughout the world and you're talking about sort of these gaps that exist that we're trying to fill. How does the UGA program change over time to fill these gaps that exist in getting to train these new professionals in storytelling and using insights to drive ROI and all the things that kind of come along with the insights industry changing?

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Marcus - 00:20:02:

Yeah. I think that academia tends to be siloed and a lot of times, people are doing research on, like, very important issues and they're trying to identify normative models, like, how things should work, but that might not be the way things work around the world. One example I like to use is that when we're doing mathematical research in binary numbers in the fifties, there was no application for that. Right? However, if we had not done that, we wouldn't have computers.

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Stephanie - 00:20:32:

Right.

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Marcus -00:20:33:

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So, the way the MMR program will balance out the rigor with that is that from our inception, we were created to support the industry. So, the MMR program was also created with the endowment from the Coca Cola company and other companies like Nielsen and Mark because a lot of scanner data was becoming available in the late seventies, and there were no skills to analyze that. So, the Coca Cola Company endowed the University of Georgia to create this program to develop those skills. So, we were created to be to be serving the industry, not like a master's program that's a stepping stone for, like if you do well in a master's program, we invite you to our PhD program.

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Stephanie - 00:21:14:

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Right. Right. It's like a practical program. Yeah.

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Marcus - 00:21:17:

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Yes. It was created for the industry. It's closely tied with the industry. We have an advisory board, the AYTM is part of that help us to guide where the industry is going. We are currently going through a curriculum overview and review that's not led by the professors and what the professors wanna teach, but by a committee of professionals of our advisory board. To that extent, we are a very unique program that's not created, like, let's create a pipeline for PhD programs, the faculty will teach what their interests are. No. We are guided by the industry.

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Tiffany - 00:21:57:

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I love that.

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Stephanie - 00:21:58:

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So Marcus, one of the questions that we’ve been eager to talk to you about is, with the rise of automation, generative AI, and related to both of those things, this emerging connectedness of data sources that’s really transforming the market research in insights, industry. From that lens, are there any particular skills that you think the next generation of researchers need to thrive in an insights role and are there any new competencies that you are focusing on, preparing students, just in that context of AI and data connectedness?

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Marcus - 00:22:30:

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First of all, people that are out there thinking about this career or in this career. I can tell it's not been the first time that the industry was stripped down by new technology. There's a big data era. There was a do-it-yourself era. You know? So, adaptability is a very important skill. So, of course, we do have to have the technical skills - data integration, analytics, comfort using AOL's AI tools are a must-haves. There's some research showing that middle level managers are resisting in adapting AI, whether they don't wanna learn something new or they are afraid of losing their jobs and the c-suite team is trying to push that the new talent come with those skills so they can push the new managers to adapt. So, our students have to have that. We also think in terms of human skills - curiosity, creativity, empathy, and the ability to ask the right questions. At this point, uh, AI cannot do that yet, even in technical work, AI maybe can do 80% of the heavy lifting, but that 20%, that's where you're gonna make our contribution. Strategic skills like the ability to frame insights on the context of this business decision, not just not just research output, whether they are driven by AI or not. And as I said, we are emphasizing adaptability. The world is gonna be changing and it's gonna be changing fast. You cannot just be doing what you did ten years ago but, you know, you still have a lot to continue regardless of whatever new technology is going. And I actually have noticed, like, when we had our summit last summer in August, there was a lot more feeling of, like, doom and gloom about AI. I don't know if it was just AI, election year or whatever, like, uncertainty, or a recession but this year, the future of insights, people seem to be much more comfortable with AI, and there's some excitement about it. So, that was, like, really comforting for me to hear.

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Stephanie - 00:24:34:

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Yeah. We're definitely seeing that too. I think even just in our own company and with our customers too. Right? Just that, yeah, a lot of hand wringing earlier on. As people start to figure out their role as the human in the loop, I think a lot of that starts to dissipate.

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Tiffany - 00:24:51:

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Yeah. I think in the industry, as people lean in, like you mentioned, the human-skill curiosity and just being curious about how things like AI and technology and automations can streamline their workflows and give them opportunities to really lean harder into the insight side of things and the storytelling side of things, being really curious and just playing around with stuff is really important in this time, right, when things are changing rapidly quickly.

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Marcus - 00:25:15:

Yes. Definitely.

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Tiffany - 00:25:17:

You've talked a lot about people coming out of UGA and moving into new stages of their careers. Obviously, the UGA MMR program has turned out so many leaders across both the client and the supplier side. When you look at where alumni have ended up, are there any patterns or lessons that have really shaped the way that you structure the curriculum or the mentorship opportunities today? And when you think ahead from that, how do you see methods evolving to really get more students ready to exist in the world of complexity and cross disciplinary demands and the data heavy world that they're stepping into tied to those historical alumni's learnings?

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Marcus - 00:25:55:

So, the pattern that I usually observe both from the market and the student is that job opportunities for the students straight out of the program tend to be fewer on the client side than on the supplier side. That's because a lot of the client side positions are basically three years of supplier experience. It is desired but we do have a lot of clients come from the program and say, that's the best kept secret because we get students that are excellent, really prepared, day one and they don't have biases on different cultures from different companies. Right? So, they become very loyal to the company. And on the student's side, there are students that think, like, I work really hard to acquire these technical skills. I'm afraid if I'm going to the brand side, I might lose those because I might be doing more project management, then, I’ll rather go and do supplier first, be involved with a lot of projects. But there are some students, they're like, if I don't have to touch SPSS or SAS for the rest of my life.

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Stephanie - 00:27:03:

Totally.

Marcus - 00:27:04:

I still understand research and work with my partners to influence my internal clients. That's the way I like to see my career evolving. And when it comes to skills, I think, like, more and more AI will be able to do the hardest tools. Right? But it is important that you understand. I tell them, like, if you don't know what you don't know, when you get the answer from AI, you're gonna think it's correct. So I can do complex analysis using AI, but I know more or less what to expect, what the results should be and I can cross check using SPSS or Jumper SAS but if you don't know, you don't know how to evaluate that but AI will be able to do that. What is gonna be harder for AI is going to be to incorporate the soft skills, the persuasive skills today. And we emphasize that a lot. Not only through group projects, but for example, we have sessions just on how to develop persuasive PowerPoints. Most of these students do a couple of individual presentations where they receive feedback from faculty to the point that it's like, you didn't step away from the podium. You only made contact with that one person. I was like, just because I'm the room in the room and I'm grading, it doesn't mean that you need to be looking at me. And one day, that will be a CMO. You don't need to be just looking at that person. Make contact. You gotta, like, use your hands to emphasize points. So we provide, like, all these soft skills to make sure that they have that. And I think moving forward, you know, in addition to the new technologies and new tools that become available that they will have to learn, I think more and more is usability to influence decision making. And you don't influence decision making with base rates, percentages. We actually were talking about this in class yesterday. I said, you don't really see politicians that wanna persuade people saying, oh, 8% of single mothers in Ohio have to work two jobs to pay for their bills. No. They'll say, like, I met Tiffany. Tiffany is a single mom in Ohio. She has two kids, John and Mary. They struggle there. Tiffany might be the only person you hired that's facing that situation. Right? But just because the salience of the information of the storytelling is so much persuasive than saying the percentages, the base rates, and so on.

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Tiffany - 00:29:30:

Sure.

Stephanie - 00:29:31:

Yeah. Absolutely.

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Marcus - 00:29:33:

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I don't know if you have kids, Tiffany. But you live in Florida, right?

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Tiffany - 00:29:37:

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I am a single dog mom of three though.

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Marcus - 00:29:40:

You live in Florida, don’t you?

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Tiffany - 00:29:42:

I am in Florida. Yep. I am in Saint Petersburg, Florida

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Stephanie - 00:29:45:

So, Marcus, we spent a lot of time so far really focused on your approach to running the UGA MMR program, but I would love to pivot toward the end here and just talk a little bit about your research. I know you've shared at conferences and are currently working on a journal article around spheres of influence, specifically exploring popularity as a source of perceived expertise. It was interesting for me to read that because AYTM has been doing some research in a slightly similar vein in partnership with Revlon. We're focusing specifically on the role of celebrities versus influencers and how they sort of have different perceptions and ultimately different impacts on brand perceptions. But I would love it if you could talk a little bit about spheres of influence, kinda what that is and how popularity engenders perceptions of expertise, and what are the implications of that?

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Marcus - 00:30:35:

Okay. I think from an academic standpoint expertise, at least, is associated with knowledge. How much knowledge do you have? You study the area or you are well known for being an expert in the area. What we are showing here is that just the fact that you're popular, people can actually see you as an expert. And we know, like, if somebody is an influencer in a given product category, let's say, makeup. Right? So they might, because of their post be seen as an expert but should they be seen as an expert if they are then trying to influence people who are thinking about buying fertilizer? Right? So, the theory would say you should not, because that person has not established an expertise yet. So that's what we call, evaluating proximal and distal product categories and we show that just because they're popular on a proximal category, if you do makeup and you influence fashion, but that can also carry over to, like, a distal category - the fertilizer. People think you’re an expert in fertilizer just because you’re popular. So there was an interesting finding that they have in this research. Well, another piece of research, if you have, like, a few minutes that we have is on the effect of color saturation on consumers' perception of product potency. What we find is that products that have a higher column saturation, their packaging or the product itself, people make the inference that if it's a scent, it will be a stronger scent. If it's a lower saturation, it's a milder scent.

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Stephanie - 00:32:10:

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Totally makes intuitive sense, doesn't it?

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Marcus - 00:32:14:

Yes, And we show that inference has, like, a crossover effect on other senses that we have. We give people, they cannot see the candle, but they can see a picture of the candle where we manipulate the saturation of the color of the candle. They're smelling the same candle. And they think that the candle has a higher saturation, oh, it's a much stronger smell or it's a milder smell. Or even color paper, a paper with higher saturation, oh, that's a much thicker paper than dissolved paper, which are exactly the same product. So, we did some research in a week, reviewed a lot of product categories in Target, on the Target website which show that, like, about 57% of the companies are using saturation the wrong way based on what they wanna communicate the potency of their product. Do you guys know that SunBum sunscreen?

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Stephanie - 00:33:08:

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Yeah.

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Marcus - 00:33:09:

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We estimate that if they follow our advice by putting, like, a higher SPF with a higher saturation on the packaging, they might increase their sales by $22,000,000 based on our experiments.

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Stephanie - 00:33:22:

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Because is it perceived efficacy in that context for that one? Like, it's stronger SPF because it's bolder, more saturated?

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Marcus - 00:33:30:

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So if you look at their packaging and I understand their thinking behind it. So they show, like, SPF 70. Their packaging has a lighter saturation, which means, like, you get more protection, you're not gonna get as dark. The 50 SPF is darker because you're gonna get dark. But, actually, when we flip and put the 50 where we think the 70 should be, the choice proportion for that brand increases.

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Stephanie - 00:33:56:

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That's such a perfect example. Yeah. That's awesome. Very cool.

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Tiffany - 00:34:01:

Yeah. The psychology of color. Right?

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Stephanie - 00:34:02:

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Yeah

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Marcus - 00:34:03:

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Yeah.

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Tiffany - 00:34:04:

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So very interesting. Awesome. Well, this is usually something that we like to ask all of our guests, when we close out. What's one piece of advice that you would offer to someone that's starting out in the world of insights or strategy?

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Marcus - 00:34:17:

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Stay curious. You know? Like, we talked about. Curiosity is gonna be one of the skills. Try to learn. Ask questions, why are these things happening the way they are happening? Build a range. Build a range from technical skills to soft skills that help to influence people. And just don't deliver research, deliver a perspective, deliver an impactful piece of insight that will at least make people think about, like, are we doing the right things, or can we do things better?

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Stephanie - 00:34:48:

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I love it. No. Those are great. Well, thank you so much, Marcus, for your time today. This has been an excellent conversation. Can't wait for this episode to come out, and people get to hear about your research and what you're doing at UGA. So, thank you again so much for your time.

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Marcus - 00:35:02:

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Thank you. It was a pleasure.

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Tiffany - 00:35:04:

Thanks for letting me jump on this side of the mic today. Awesome.

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Stephanie - 00:35:08:

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Great.