Free public talk: Medicine + Marketing: pandemic lessons on healthcare, technology, and reality

In their upcoming, free Tauhere UC Connect public lecture at the University of Canterbury – Medicine + Marketing: what we’ve learned about healthcare, technology, and reality in a pandemic – UC Erskine Fellow Professor Stacy Wood from North Carolina State University and Professor Ekant Veer, UC Business School, University of Canterbury, will discuss wellbeing and social marketing amid Covid-19, on Wednesday 29 March.

Two domains that have long viewed their consumers through a logic-loaded lens are technology and healthcare – both have made predictions about what their customers will do by what they think their customers should do. As these two domains now intersect in many futuristic disruptive innovations surrounding digital healthcare, the logic of “should” may be doubly dangerous in predicting and promoting consumer/patient behaviour.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, industry attention centred around telehealth and AI-assisted healthcare. But a global assault by a novel coronavirus demonstrated that the future of medical delivery and wellbeing has far deeper and more basic roots in behavioural elements like decision-making, risk perceptions, identity creation, narrative, etc. These elements are the bedrock of consumer behaviour, behavioural insights, and marketing, but have received little attention in medicine.

In this public talk, Professors Veer and Wood will discuss several projects in the healthcare sectors in New Zealand and globally and highlight the need for marketing theory in the development of new means of healthcare delivery. “We hope we can show the richness of this fast-changing ‘market’ for the creation of new consumer theory and the necessity of building really exciting interdisciplinary teams for building really impactful knowledge that actually changes lives for the better.”

The year 2023 marks the University of Canterbury’s sesquicentenary and the 150th anniversary theme is: Ka titiro whakamuri, ki te anga whakamua | Guided by the Past, Shaping the Future.

About the speakers

Stacy Wood is the Langdon Distinguished University Professor of Marketing at North Carolina State University (NC State), United States. Dr Wood joined the NC State Poole College of Management in 2010. Dr Wood has won numerous awards including 13 teaching awards at USC, Duke, and NC State, including USC’s top university-wide undergraduate teaching award in 2007. Dr Wood was recently elected President of the Association of Consumer Research, serving as President-Elect in 2017, President in 2018, and Past-President in 2019. Her research focuses on how consumers respond and adapt to change or innovation. This applies both to individuals’ processing of new product information as well as emotional or cultural reactions to new innovations, trends or rituals. Current projects include investigations of new product design and investment, expert/novice differences in new product adoption, consumer response to technology innovations, medical innovations and patient experience, successful adoption of risky innovations, and the neuroscience of change behaviour. Her research has appeared in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Journal of Retailing. Dr Wood is the current Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. Dr Wood served as the Executive Director for the Center for Neuroeconomic Research while at USC and is an affiliated faculty member of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium and an affiliated scholar at the School of Medicine and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Ekant Veer is a Professor of Marketing in the Department of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship at the University of Canterbury’s Business School, in Christchurch. A multi-award-winning teacher and researcher, Dr Veer was named in the Top 40 under-40 Business School Professors worldwide, won an Ako Aotearoa Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award, was UC’s 2017 Teaching Medal awardee, and won the UCSA’s Lecturer of the Year award five times (to date). His work looks at the role marketing can play in driving social change and community wellbeing as well as what impact digital technology plays in consumer interactions and their sense of identity. His research has been published in numerous international journals, such as the Journal of Marketing Management, The European Journal of Marketing, and The Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. Ekant is also the Associate Dean of Postgraduate Research supporting the learning journey of UC’s research students and supervisors.