Students of the new sales program founded by Vivint will take part in state of the art facial coding analytics of marketing strategies.
The primary goal of the new Todd Pedersen Professional Sales Program is to provide effective, real-life sales education. The use of facial coding will provide students with immediate, unfiltered feedback on their marketing strategies and product design.
Facial Action Coding uses sensors places on the face and eyes of a test subject. The sensors then read facial expression, blood pressure and muscle movement. The technology was established to taxonomize the human face. Taxonomy is the science of categorizing muscle groups to find and define shared characteristics. This allows researchers to make educated evaluations of how the subjects react to stimuli.
In the case of sales students, this technology will be used to analyze the effectiveness of their products and marketing, making sales and marketing more like a science.
“There is a psychological science to getting people to want something,” Garrett Clough, senior, said. “If you can appeal to the right parts of that person’s brain you can get them to seriously consider buying something they might not have initially thought they wanted.”
Students designing a sales method, marketing strategy or a new product will be able to use this “psychological science” that Clough talked about.
“This is classic UVU engaged learning,” Stetson Peck, junior, said. “Before you could just learn theories about how to appeal to people and hope for the best. Using the facial coding is now taking us to that next level of really knowing if those theories are right.”
Peck explained that now students can design a sales strategy appealing to what people want to see when they are deciding to make a purchase, then take that prototype and try it out on a few people being facially coded and watch to see if they see what they were meant to see.
“There is a science to eye movement across a page,” Tyler Miller, senior, said. “If you design a page, billboard, ad, or whatever to please a person as their eyes sweep the page then you are in a good place. But if you mess that up, if you put something that stops that sweeping motion or makes a person feel unbalanced they aren’t going to like it. They won’t know why they don’t like it, they just know that they don’t. That’s the last thing you want.”
Facial Action Coding goes far beyond tracking eye movement across an advertisement. Because it is designed to take facial expression into account, the students will receive more feedback than just if they made a smooth eye movement track.
“It also looks at if they grimace, if they squint their eyes from the inside of their eyes or from their eyebrows,” Miller said. “If they squint from the inside of their eyes, that’s not so bad, it just means they’re just thinking. If they squint from their eyebrows or eyelids, it means that they don’t trust what they are looking at.”
Students knowing how potential clients interpret their sales strategies make for an invaluable employee for future sales employers Clough explained.
“This really gives us an advantage,” Clough said. “Not everyone has access to this kind of technology. It’s such a cool thing. It’s a great resume booster. But beyond that we can learn skills that’ll give us confidence to start our own businesses already knowing how people will react. That’ll look good to investors I think.”
