Transcript

Bennie F. Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We hope to introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. 

Today, our guest is Virginia Tech’s own Dr. Rajesh Bagchi. Rajesh has been the RB Pampyon Professor of Marketing and the Associate Dean for Research in Graduate Programs at the Business School of Virginia Tech. He is a scholar among scholars and has been listed as one of the top 30 most productive business scholars in the world based on his publications in premier journals, including AMA’s Journal of Marketing and AMA’s Journal of Marketing Research. He studies how consumers can be nudged into making better decisions for themselves and societal wellbeing. His research lies at this intersection of several fields encompassing an entire gamut of consumer decision-making. From information processing to making purchase and post-purchase evaluations is also one of the emerging experts on AI and marketing. Welcome to our podcast.

Rajesh Bagchi 

Thank you so much, Bennie. It’s my honor to be here.

Bennie 

Oh my goodness, it’s such a pleasure to have you here. We talked about just how much, so much of your career has been wrapped into your service and work and growth with the American Marketing Association. You know, we talk about your scholarship and you’ve been an active part of our journals and our journal community. Just to get started, talk a bit about what it means to be published in… leading journals. What does that mean for you as a practitioner or as professor?

Rajesh 

To be honest as I was mentioning earlier, I think AMA is my second home. I mean AMA has given me the opportunity to grow as not just a scholar and grow in academia as an academic, but also as a human being. I met friends, I’ve networked with a lot of people who are AMA members and I have learned a lot from all of them. It is absolutely an honor to be published anywhere and some of the top leading journals are you know they’re very difficult to publish in and…

To be honest, I think most of the credit goes to my collaborators. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some really amazing scholars and some of whom have been my mentors and some students and others in other universities and so on. But absolutely, I mean, it’s been a learning experience. I consider myself as a lifelong learner. So, know, anytime we publish things, things are always changing. The world is moving at a fast pace.So just helps me be on top of the pulse and automatically adjust and learn new things as well.

Bennie 

One of the things I loved is you mentioned just now, but you talked about that stance of always being humble and open to learn. 

Rajesh

Absolutely.

Bennie

How has that helped you in your profession, do you think?

Rajesh

I think that is probably the most important facet for anybody at all different stages of your career, professional career, let’s say as a faculty member. I think different skills are important. So as a junior faculty member, as a mid-level faculty member, now as an administrator. So being open to learning is very important. So I think when I run into a student, I don’t think of it as a teaching moment as much as I think of it as a learning moment.

Because many times these students are bringing in fresh ideas and fresh perspectives. And I’ve been in the field way too long, so my ways of thinking sometimes can be very dated. So I think this is an opportunity for me to learn and understand how the new generations are thinking, because really they are going to be the leaders of tomorrow. So it is very important for us to continuously adapt, learn, and adjust. And some of the things we’ll be talking about today is exactly that.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Yeah, so it reminds me of a conversation I was having recently about having this multi-directional, multi-generational connection with mentorship and learning with peers and learning from those ahead of you, but equally learning from those adapting and coming behind in terms of space in their, okay. So we’re going to talk a lot of, a lot of your work deals with human consuming decision-making. And I’ll put a pin in that because we’re going to talk about artificial intelligence a minute, but let’s talk about this human intelligence. Since you’ve been studying consumer decision-making, how have you seen the change in consumer behavior show up? When we look at, I think about the decision sets that we had 30 years ago as consumers versus 30 months ago. Talk a bit about what you’ve seen in terms of how we’ve evolved as consumers.

Rajesh 

Mm-hmm.

I think that’s a very good question. So, if you think about 30 years back to the consumer of today, you will see a lot of change. Right now we are in the age of abundance. There are a plethora of choices. Consumers have very little time. But at the same time, they have information about all the alternatives out there. 

So back in the day, we probably did not have that many options. Generally, the opportunity costs were very high. So if you did not want to buy this product, if you wanted to buy some other product, you’d probably have to travel miles. It wasn’t at your fingertips. But now the world has changed. Now information is at your fingertips. So consumers are also changing. I mean, back in the day, people tended to be very loyal. They would continue to buy products from the same company until something happened.

Bennie

Right.

Rajesh

Today’s consumer is used to change, you know, with AI and all the other technologies that have proliferated their life. Some of the change that they want is not even what they’re expecting in this product. It might be something else at work. Like there may be HR softwares that are fully updated and when they come home and they want to, you know, use, say, Walmart’s, you know, verbal, like use voice to create a grocery list on Walmart’s app and they’re like, this is not working. How’s that? So when I am at work, I’m dealing with such complex things and things are working. How is it that it’s not working here? So yes, the consumers have changed over time. Their expectations have gone up considerably. Between manufacturer, retailer, and consumers, now consumers wield a lot of power because they have a lot more information than they had previously. And they certainly have many more options. So clearly, today’s consumer is more careful, more informed, cannot be fooled very easily has much higher expectations.

Bennie

Right. So with these higher expectations, what advice do you have for marketing leaders as you think about it, as they try to build programs to meet these new thresholds?

Rajesh 

I think, you know, at a very broad level, we go back to where we were back in the day, which is basically building emotional connections. Because when consumers are connected with your brand, they’re connected with you, then likelihood of them staying with you is going to be longer. Now, how you get there may be a little different today than it was back then. As I mentioned earlier, you know, it reminds me like, you know, when I think about this future that we are in, it reminds me of this back to the future theme.

Bennie

Right. Yeah, okay.

Rajesh

Partly because back in the day when I was a young child growing up in India and my mother or father would send me to the store to buy something, I would go on my bicycle and bike up to the store. And the store owner knew everything about me, knew where I lived, who my siblings were, what my father did for a living. So they had complete information. Now in this day and age, it is the same thing, except the information that they are trying to get at is digital.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. All right.

Rajesh 

They may not actually see you in person, but every time we go somewhere, we leave some crumbs behind and they’re trying to put it together. So that kind of emotional connection, whether it’s through technology or whatever it is through personalization, and some of those things will continue to be important. And I feel that since consumers have a lot more information, it is best to be transparent. It’s best to give them the best deals you can. You have very little chance of fooling consumers anymore. So I think keeping that in mind would be very, helpful.

Bennie 

Now, as we make a pivot to the future, we talked a bit about human intelligence and consumer space in there. I’m going to slide us forward a bit to talk about the emerging space of generative artificial intelligence. And we’ve seen brands try to kind of fast track that really hard earned intimacy that you talked about.

Knowing where my customers are, having them share with me fully and disclose so I can provide better service for them. We’ve seen in the past few months in particular, AI applications and marketing take it one step too far just above the trust threshold and create really kind of awkward, dissonant experiences of brands. 

You know, the question I’d love to ask and get your insight in there, how do brands balance being open for experimentation and taking advantage of the efficiencies and dynamism of AI while still maintaining this trusted relationship with consumers?

Rajesh 

Bennie, I have to say that’s a very tough question to answer, right? I think…

Bennie 

It’s what we’re here together, my friend. Yeah.

Rajesh

I know exactly, and I know exactly. The issue is now on top of that, customers also have very high expectations. At some level, they are providing you with more data, you as marketers with more data and information. And like I was saying earlier, they’re now used to, you know, in other phases of their life, experiencing, you know, the benefits that AI brings along, the efficiency and optimizing and being able to find optimal solutions. So therefore, customers are beginning to have very high expectations. So clearly, it is going to be a challenge for marketers. Some of the challenges actually go beyond that. One, of course, it’s the data privacy, data integrity, and all of those issues. Like, how do you get data from customers, ensure that they are being ethically used?

And as you know, some of those laws are, you know, they are bound to change. We are working through all these privacy regulations. Customers are also afraid that the data that they’re providing you today, you might, you as a marketer may use it against them in the future in some way that they actually can’t even fathom right now. So clearly it is a difficult space to be in. The challenge that marketers also face is, you know, what they’re trying to do is everybody is seeing a different part of the elephant.

And they’re trying to figure out what is the animal in the room, right? And what I mean by that is the data that we are talking about. Like, just think about a consumer interacting with the firm, right? You have so many different data. You have data about the consumer’s preferences. You have data, first-person data, what the consumer actually did on your website. You have second-level data. You have third-level data that is coming from cookies. You have data on transactions, right?

Bennie 

Right, right.

Rajesh

And there’s so much more. But on top of that, firms also have to deal with other data, like revenue data, data that is coming through from all their other channels, advertising data. What is ROI happening? So all in all, it’s a very complicated word. So there is no direct answer. So I cannot just say, hey, this is where it is going to be. But one thing I can tell you that with the advent of generative AI, like chat GPT, for example, or copilot, people have begun to accept and embrace AI a little bit more. I think prior to this, so some of this came out in 2022, maybe prior to this, if you remember, people were very avoidant, they were very risk averse and they always felt like, you know, it’s a mystery box. I don’t know what is happening inside it. How is it gonna respond to, you know, all this information? But people are beginning to adapt and adopt AI more. So I think in the future, clearly, we will see more adoption. But the point remains that we have to work on laws and regulations. And as marketers, it is our responsibility to make sure that the data that we are capturing is used appropriately, that it is not sold and used for other purposes. But again, that is up to us, right, as marketers, as we figure out this new world.

Bennie

Right. Right.

And I think it’s a space, as you said, it’s up for us to be proactive in, right? We shouldn’t sit back and wait for the regulations to happen or not happen, be structured or unstructured when we have an active space in there. I think it’s interesting to your point that AI and machine learning and algorithm learning have been a part of products and tools and approaches for marketing for a very long time, but they were behind the scenes. And I think that breakthrough, the open AI moment that gave

Rajesh 

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Bennie

Everybody has a taste to try and see and try and buy. You said it completely opened up. We’ve had lots of conversations where generative AI and that space is a part of AI, but it’s not all of AI. You know, and what are the other things that we can benefit from? My team and I conducted a bit of research recently, and it was really fascinating that we found that AI marketing leaders are actually some of the biggest adopters of AI.

Rajesh 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Bennie

and are using it in spaces. When we look across all industries and spaces in there, it was a whopping percentage. We’re talking about over 80%, finding a way to test and try. I don’t know to our point if we’ve found solutions and answers yet, but we do see that marketing is playing a role to push the technology uses forward. When you think about…

the roles if you’re a marketing leader today. What do you think is a good stance to approach this? You’re going to be working in a space where you may have pressures from your CEO or your CFO or other counterparts or stakeholders to move fast or more reckless. What advice would you have for marketing leaders in the absence of formal regulation?

Rajesh

think just like how you deal with any other decision making that you do, be pragmatic, have some guidelines in place. One of the suggestions I would have with anybody who is working with AI tools is think of the different aspects of how AI could be used. So there is the input aspect, what goes into the AI machine learning algorithms, how the machine learning algorithms are actually functioning. How those outputs are coming out and what do do with them. So some way of thinking about it and at all these areas, you can intervene in different ways. So when you’re thinking about input, it is important to recognize that the algorithm is only going to be as good as the data it’s being trained on. If the data are defective, the data biases, if the data are not complete, then clearly the outcomes that you will get are

Bennie

Right.

Rajesh

going to also be questionable, right? And likewise, having a deeper understanding of what is actually going in and how the machine learning process is working will also be important. Because I think if you’re somebody who’s going to make important decisions based on it, then I think it is important for you to at least understand what the algorithms are trying to do, rather than just blindly following them. Because then, of course, you have no idea where this is going. And finally, how will you respond to what the outcomes are, right? So my suggestion to some folks is that, you you can interact with it at different levels, but think of it as a project manager, because, you know, someday you’re gonna have a lot of tools in your, you know, arsenal. In the past, and here is another thing that I tell my students, right? When students come to me and they ask me what is the most important thing to be successful, I say, it’s the question that you ask. You know, for example, when, the apple fell on Newton’s head, he could have asked so many different questions. Why did it fall on my head? Why not my friend’s head? Why this tree and not that tree? But instead of that, I mean, supposedly he asked the question, why did it fall? So the same thing goes with AI also, that when you’re working with AI, understanding the questions, what is it that you want to ask, that is very important. In the past, finding the answer was difficult, but now AI actually helps you find answers very quickly.

Bennie 

Right. Right, right, right.

Rajesh 

But if you don’t know what you’re asking, if you don’t have a framework in place, then chances are it won’t give you the best edge that you’re probably seeking. So think of it as a project manager does with projects, right?

Bennie

Right, right. I smile a bit as I hear you say that I think about the conversations over the years I’ve had with my team, where I always tell them I’m not interested if we have all the answers, but my encouragement and challenge is that we have all the questions and being able to explore that. So as you think about our marketplace, we have multiple generations kind of colliding in a consumer experience at the same time.

What advice do you have for your students who are going to be marketing to increasingly younger generations who are growing up, who have a different space, who are going to grow up with a bit less hesitation of AI being introduced because they’re to grow up in a marketplace where AI is always available.

Rajesh 

Absolutely. I think my recommendation is just like with, you know, with or without AI, it is basically try to understand your consumer base, right? All the segments are different. Now what might happen is that the segmentation is going to get even more customized. We will have a lot more information about what people like, what people don’t like. The main change that I see is that now in the newer generations are much more, much more comfortable, you know, in the digital space.

They probably end up spending more time in the digital space. But I think the basic tenets of being respectful, being, you know, personalizing your messaging, understanding their wants and needs are important. So when they are in the workplace, I think it is very important for them to get very familiar with all the AI tools, to embrace the AI tools. But the other thing is to experiment. Like with the AI tools, now we are able to experiment a lot more, right? So for example, back in the day, if you wanted to, I’m talking about somebody who’s testing content, right, is doing some kind of A-B testing. It would take a lot of effort, right, to come up with different messaging and then testing them out. But in today’s day and age, I mean, it’s going to be fairly easy to do it, right? But what does that mean? Does that mean that you’re going to let AI do all of the automation for you? Do you just say, hey, I figured this out, just solve the solution and come to me? Probably not, because I think, you know, the…ones that I’ll be most successful, will again use the AI tools like we were discussing and ask the right questions, but then interpret the answers in a deeper way. Like understand that how is it that I can use this to my benefit. So what I mean is ultimately the same rules apply that try to understand your consumers, try to build relationships with them, try to personalize it as much as you can, try to build brand loyalty.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Right.

Rajesh

Be honest and transparent, right? Now the tools you’re using to do that, slightly different.

Bennie 

Right.

So I’m gonna ask this question. You brought up the term that just kind of the point that we all strive for, this notion of brand loyalty. Now, as we look in our expanded consumer space, AI infused, dynamic marketplace as a context, what can we hope for for loyalty? Is this a long-term relationship like our grandparents or is this a quick more transactional relationship. You know what, because I often wonder what does our loyalty arc mean today?

Rajesh

Absolutely. Again, that’s a very difficult question to answer because to be honest, nowadays consumers have more options than they ever did before. And they have a lot of power. They have a lot of information. They have peer groups who are informing them. So there are multiple types and sources of information. So I do think that brand loyalty is going to be increasingly important.

Bennie

Right, right.

Rajesh 

One way of thinking about it is if you think about, there are different ways of looking at how to market to consumers and what tools we are trying to do, we’re trying to use. But one way is to think about the IDA model, that is the AIDA model, So where you have awareness, interest, you’re trying to increase desire, and then finally action.

So what you’re trying to do is this is through the funnel. So you’re trying to create awareness and ultimately you want action from the consumer. And then you want to bring them into your family and then make sure that they remain engaged with the family. Now, if you think about it, awareness is the hardest part. That’s where people spend a lot of money and resources. And in this competitive day and age when there are so many options out there, it takes a lot to acquire consumers. So acquisition was always harder than retention, even in the past, but it is becoming increasingly more difficult.

Why do I bring this up? I bring this up to make the point that that’s why retention is even more important, because it’s going to be harder, because you’ll be in a very competitive space trying to get new customers. But at the same time, like I said, you’re dealing with a complex marketplace. So my argument would be that you should still focus on brand loyalty. You should try to build a loyal customer base.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Rajesh

And in order to build the base, use some of the same things that I discussed earlier, which is basically try to understand your consumers, segment them, know which consumers are going to stay longer and which consumers are not, understand what the pain points are, and connect with them. Because even if you don’t do that, your peers and your competitors are going to do that. And that is why it is very essential for you to as well. Embrace technology so that you are in that space where you can do that. In addition to that, some of the things you can do is build a brand community. So one of the things that is interestingly happening more and more is with the advent of more and more technology, people are actually looking at each other for suggestions and recommendations. So when I want to watch the next movie, when I have very little time, my wife has very little time, and we want to, we go and look at what others who have seen the movie are saying. Because to me, I feel like, OK, that is probably the most informative source of information for me. So what I’m trying to say is build brand communities. Get testimonials from your customers. Because ultimately, for now at least, it’s humans making decisions. There will be a time when, for example, in the past, humans were marketing to humans. Then a part came where we dealing with AI marketing to humans. And tomorrow a day may come when AI will be marketing to AI. We all might have our own agents walking, you know, and my agent will tell me that, hey you should buy this. And, you know, that is an AI marketing to AI. That day, by the way, is not very far away.

Bennie 

Right. Yeah.

Right. Well, have somewhat, you know, it’s interesting as well. to talk about the kind of complexity of search and the AI space in there. We’re all kind of marveling at just the corner that’s been turned on Google search in the last few weeks with, with Gemini and the space in there. It’s changing the way we think about the data that comes in. I was also over the summer, really intrigued by some of the search behaviors that are happening with companies like Reddit.

Where the search is kind of your idea, your question, plus Reddit, it’s becoming this intersection of both search and social, to your point. It’s like I want to find out the reviews, but I want to make sure the reviews are coming from an unfiltered review space in an existing community that I’m interested in that has specificities to the question I’m asking.

Rajesh 

Absolutely. And I think that is going to become increasingly more and more important. That’s why customer testimonials, building a community, brand community. Again, these are not new, Veni. I mean, this is something that we’ve been doing for 20, 30 years. And I’m just making the point that the tools have changed, but I think the fundamentals still remain the same.

Bennie

Right.

Which is really a core to when we talk about marketing emerging as a profession. Like having that set of fundamentals and having the skills that we can reinforce and we can lean on is really what creates a profession. mean, how many times have marketing leaders and marketing team members been in where the counterparts have kind of, well, just make it happen. You do the marketing thing you do versus understanding that we are a profession with a core set of disciplines and skills that we’re the and they amplify and accelerate at its heart. It’s based on the art and science that we’ve built.

Rajesh 

Absolutely. And today’s day and age, what they’re doing is they will tell you the same thing, but they’ll also simultaneously cut resources and say, now do it with less resource and then find a way out and make sure it works because the other company is just showing such return on investment.

Bennie

So here’s the strategic advantage conversation. An advantage is only an advantage if it separates you from your competition, from your competitive set, from other ideas and spaces. If you have AI and I have the same AI, who wins?

Rajesh

That’s a great point. Actually, it’s the same thing with email, right? When we first started having email, email made our life simpler and easier. When we first started shifting from horse-led carriages to machines, it made transportation easier. But now we’re flying long distances, and we are dealing with this deluge of emails, right? Where it’s like, then sometimes we just come back and think, hey, those in-person meetings around the water cooler.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Rajesh 

You can get things quickly done. You don’t need Slack. You don’t need Teams. You can just have a quick conversation. We agree on something and we can move our separate ways, right? But yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Bennie 

Right. Right, so you end up in the space where I love these moments where the simple humble postcard still drives action. Yeah, it’s.

Rajesh 

Actually believe it or not they do. And I have my theories on why it does. And part of it is because it catches us unawares. So one of the things that has been happening, there is a big shift now moving from in the online world, they’re moving into the mobile world. And part of the reason is people are much more engaged with their cell phones. 

So you can actually, you know, engage them more and actually affect any change or, you know, share information that they might actually remember. They’re less likely to be distracted. And if you take it one step further, you know, things like podcasts are very successful because oftentimes when people are listening to podcasts, they’re actually paying their full attention. Like, you know, something we are doing right now.

And believe it or not, like you were saying, like, you know, when you send something in the you know, in snail mail, right, through regular mail and people actually see it on paper, they are more likely to be engaged at that time because, you know, they are, they might even have, you know, their, all their guards down and, you know, they would be much more impacted.

Bennie

Right.

There’s something to having a receptive audience, right? To your message that has in there and keeping the guards down. As we imagine, one of the challenges, and I’m gonna ask you a bit about creativity in AI. I mean, that’s a space that’s been a tension in the marketing brand community and the design community as well.

Rajesh 

Absolutely.

Bennie

Using AI as a replacement for human creativity. How can marketers help to protect the space for their adjacent peers, the designers and the creators in the space in there so that we kind of protect that human creativity as an asset for our business strategy?

Rajesh 

My perspective on this is, like we were discussing that this becomes a tool, right? Ultimately, if you have the same tool, I have the same tool, then what makes us different? Like, so how can you be better than me in being creative? Well, you have to learn how to work with the tool. So my take on it is that AI is here to stay. It is not one of those trends that will disappear. So I think the most successful folks will learn how to work with AI tools, AI technology.

Bennie

Right, right.

Rajesh 

And some people will be able to paint a Picasso while others will try to figure out why that sells and why that doesn’t. So clearly, I feel again, it’s a tool. And I feel that our colleagues in our field, it will require us to learn new skill sets. It will require us to even assessing and evaluation.

All of that, all of the KPIs that we talk about, all of those will probably change. But I do feel that there will still be differentiation between those who are adept at using these tools skillfully and others. Where I think it will help us to some extent is, you sometimes in academia, we have this thing called the writer’s block. And I’m sure my friends who do content writing and all often, probably not often, but do suffer from it.

Where you don’t have any ideas. You’re just sitting over there trying to write this first paragraph, and it’s taking you two days. Some of that, I think, AI can really help you jumpstart some of that, because it can give you ideas and thoughts. But ultimately, think, again, I think we are far from that stage where AI will do just everything for you, and you just sit over there and marvel at how great it is. Because even if that happens, then, like you were saying earlier, everybody else has that same tool, too.

Bennie 

Right. Okay.

Rajesh 

So then you will have to find some way of painting a Picasso.

Bennie 

Right. Yeah, setting yourself apart. So we’re going to ask that question. You you talked about writer’s block, and we’re going to put a pause on using AI for idea generation. But where do you find inspiration for your research prompts? You know, you get a chance to look at the whole world of business, but then having that skill to hone in on a pithy question, an important question that helps to move the profession forward. Where do you find inspiration?

Rajesh

That’s a great question. So for me, a lot of it comes from life. So I tend to be the one that, you know, when you’re walking on the street, somehow my foot finds that little hole in the road. you know, so I’m always struggling. Like I see something and I fall for it. When I first came to the US, you know, I’d be up late at night and I would see all those belts that they were selling that you just wear it around your belly and…It has this transformational effect on you. And I bought into it right away because they just said, hey, it’s only $29 per month. But I forgot that it was for five months or six months that I had to pay because it seemed like $29 is fine. But you know, I was a student then, so it was a lot of money back then. So things of that nature, think just observing life and observing how you interact with life, it teaches you, it gives you all these teaching moments.

Bennie 

Great. Great.

Rajesh 

That is certainly one way to generate ideas. Other ways are, know, I have been in the field long enough that now, you know, I’ve read quite a bit of work in, you know, that my colleagues have published. Sometimes there are multiple theories, you know, and you start thinking about, you know, one day that, hey, this is how it should be. But then I think, well, but maybe this is what this theory says. So then you start looking at two different theories. 

So it comes, you know, one is inductive, which is basically the first one where, in you observe life and you draw in a question, the other is deductive where, you know, you’re looking at all of these approaches and then trying to figure out, OK, this is saying this, that is saying that, then what is how does it actually work? And the last one is, you know, just other people coming to me, students and saying, hey, I’ve been wondering about this. And I said,

I haven’t wondered about that, but that does sound like a great question. So like I mentioned earlier, a lot of my work that I’ve done, pretty much all the credit goes to my collaborators, mentors, and others who have helped piece it together. They’ve asked questions. They’ve played the role that sometimes AI does for us now.

Bennie 

Right. Right, well, I love going back to our first conversation about AMA being a home, being a kind of intellectual knowledge community where you have peers and mentors and co-creators and folks who prioritize things and challenge us and support us in all these different ways. I’m gonna ask for this as we’re starting a new semester, as you kind of just went through the last semester in school.

What one question came from your students that kind of shocked you this year? What one question from your students kind of stumped you as professor like, wow, I can’t believe they were thinking about this or this is a novel approach or generationally, I never would have thought of it that way. What’s something that kind of got your attention?

Rajesh

Okay, do you really want to listen to the actual question? I can share that with you and we can decide whether this is something we want to share. It was a very difficult question to answer. So I was teaching a class on negotiations and I was talking about the different tactics that people have. so somebody brought up this very morbid situation that they had to deal with in their in the real world. So this was a situation where they were working for a company in India and somebody passed away. And the the person who passed away had an accident, but the accident was not caused by the company. The person had walked out of the factory and as they were walking out, they fell and something happened and they passed away. And so this was a village in India where now four villages, they did not want the factory, they wanted support from the factory. So four villages came combined in front of the factory with a dead body in front of them. And they were negotiating. So the question that was asked of me is, how do you negotiate in this situation?

And that was eye-opening. It was a very difficult question to answer. what I told them was it all depends on who was responsible for it and what the ethical decision is. It’s not about what the right negotiation strategy is. Now, some strategies that people often use, there’s something called strategic delay that we are quite familiar with that Insurance companies, for example, often use, which is basically when you’re looking to get paid on your insurance, they will keep delaying it until you have no resource to fight them because they can delay. So it’s called strategic delay and it’s used quite frequently. So one strategy here could be just to delay the negotiations so that because the other party obviously has something big to lose.

But the question that I told them is the question that you have to ask yourself is what is the question you should be asking? Is it about trying to minimize the cost to the company in this situation or to do something that you think is right, which is basically to help the people out? So my negotiation response as a professor was instead of saying, hey, try to maximize your returns and say, you know, this is one of those situations. But I would say, you know, don’t listen to the negotiation strategies. Try to understand what happened here and how you can be helpful. You may end up losing your job, but I think you want to do what is ethically right rather than get into a fight about trying to maximize $2 for your company.

Bennie

I think, my friend, that’s a powerful way to close our conversation. Do what’s ethically right. You know, when you think about it in our world and marketing and our contemporary challenges in marketing, one of the best tools that marketing leaders and team members can have, if you arm yourself with do what’s ethically right, that’s going to give you a guide through these thorny conversations and new technologies and newer approaches and space that we deal with. If we kind of hold true to do what’s

All I appreciate is this moment and our conversation and your insight. What we’re going to do is I’m definitely going to have you back for a conversation because I know that this year is going to be another breakthrough year for AI. And I’d love to come back in 12 months and have us talk a little further about what we’re seeing, what we’re not seeing, and how we’re growing as a marketing profession with AI to either side.

Rajesh 

I would absolutely love it, Bennie, because some of the other things that I think are happening that we are actually not even measuring is fundamental change to how consumers even think and process information. Because if you go back to our marketing theories and all that, there is always like a to and fro. So you’re saying something, I’m processing that information, and then I’m responding. And there are all these theories on how we process it, right? Whether it’s system one, system two, and all that.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Rajesh 

But nowadays with AI-generated stuff, because it’s a one-way street, sometimes we don’t even question it. Because I know that I cannot question the authenticity or whatever. Sometimes I just accept it. So the way people process information might actually be changing completely, which does not. I’m not saying that consumers will not question it. What I’m saying is, at what time do they question the information? That may change.

Bennie

Right, right.

Rajesh 

It’s not immediately, but maybe a few minutes into it, they you know, process all of it. And that might actually change also the outcomes they arrive at, right? So, but anyway, I would love to have another conversation with you. I should say that I’m very honored to have been invited and thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this on a very cold day. So that’s very, very appreciated.

Bennie 

Right, right.

Oh my goodness, it’s our pleasure. And thank you for sharing with our audience in the space in there. These are the productive generative ideas that we want to explore when we think about what’s happening for marketing today and tomorrow. So thank you once again for joining us. I am AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson, and this has been another great episode of AMA’s Marketing / And.

For more information on AI for you, your team, your growth, your organization and community, feel free to follow our work and resources at AMA.org. Feel free to check out our journal articles in the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing, Journal of Market Research, Journal of Interactive Marketivity, and Journal of Marketing Public Policy. We’re AI and the future of marketing are front and center in our conversations. Thank you once again, my friend…

Rajesh

Thank you so much, Bennie.

Bennie

And we’ll see you in the future. Thank you.