Many people are exposed to — and motivated by — marketing about a hyped event such as the World Cup. But Poole College professor Stacy Wood is exploring new realms with her scholarship, applying marketing strategies to both consumer-product innovation and patient-centered health care.  

As Wood shares her research with MBA students in her consumer behavior course, they experience a more real-world-focused class, and they learn to leverage their knowledge in their professional and personal lives. 

“It makes for a more engaged classroom because it’s highly relevant,” says Wood, Langdon Distinguished University Professor of Marketing. “These things really resonate with students …They like feeling that they can understand this and can apply it anywhere.”

Wood’s research in consumer innovation initially was devoted to how companies design and launch new services and products and how people respond to and adopt the changes. Her work has broadened to include change-behavior marketing in medical care and other diverse fields. 

She collects research data using various methods, including analytical and mathematical models, people’s biographical information, MRI scans that measure brain activity, and psychological experiments. 

“It’s really easy to show how the things we find out in my field have incredibly relevant, meaningful, global impact,” she says. 

“It’s really easy to show how the things we find out in my field have incredibly relevant, meaningful, global impact.”

The impact is reinforced in health care. As medicine has become more personalized, “Research in consumer behavior is often very applicable to patient-centered decision-making,” Wood says. She has distinguished herself as one of few scholars to publish work in both top-tier marketing and medical journals. 

A past president of the Association for Consumer Research, she speaks around the world on consumer-focused innovation. She also is former editor of the Journal of Consumer Research and former executive director of NC State’s Consumer Innovation Collaborative.

Her scholarship in the medical field includes giving talks at hospitals and medical schools about how to apply marketing principles to new health technologies. Her time at medical institutions “is like going out into the larger societal classroom,” Wood says. “It’s one way the real world becomes my classroom.”

The health care exposure benefits her MBA students, too.

“I am listened to and heard as a teacher at Poole College partly because my expertise is acknowledged outside NC State,” Wood says. 

Poole students respond passionately to her health care scholarship, which centers on AI’s use in medicine. “Students are incredibly engaged talking about their own medical experiences. They want to share what’s happened to them,” she says. 

Wood’s class has provided a direct link to transformative changes professionally and personally for students. Some use their insights to inform their health care decisions.   

“I am listened to and heard as a teacher at Poole College partly because my expertise is acknowledged outside NC State.”

One student did research with Wood for Cisco, work so valuable that the company created a full-time consumer insights research role for the student after graduation.  

At a job interview with a different business, another student focused on what he’d learned about consumer research and was hired for a marketing analytics role with the company.   

“They realize it helps in an interview to talk about something they learned in my class and to cite an author and paper,” Wood says. “They show how that builds unique knowledge for them as an employee … Sometimes they’re surprised by the strength of their own knowledge.”