Anne Hamby, associate professor of marketing, was selected as one of 22 business school faculty honored by AACSB International – the world’s largest business education alliance – as an “influential leader.” Chosen from more than 1,000 AACSB-accredited schools worldwide, Hamby was selected for her impact through research, inspiring positive change in the business world and society at large.
Hamby studies how marketing narratives engage and influence audience beliefs and behavior in contexts related to consumer well-being. She hopes to aid those who communicate in the public interest in developing more persuasive interactions that will benefit society. She also aims to understand how the stories people tell about themselves can positively influence their self-view or sense of belonging and identity.
She believes it is not enough for scholars to publish their findings in academic journals and expect societal impact to occur. Hamby partners with interdisciplinary teams and organizations like Muse Storytelling and the Story Collider that use storytelling to achieve their missions. With these partners, she conducts workshops and designs educational materials that put her research findings into vernacular language, and she disseminates those findings in popular press outlets like the Conversation.
“One of the best ways to create societal impact through research is to arm future generations with scientific literacy,” she says. Through her special topics course, undergraduate students test hypotheses about persuasive messages using narratives. They learn about the theory of narrative persuasion but, even more importantly, they grasp the workbench processes behind the science – knowledge that empowers them as potential future researchers and consumers of research-related information.
Another example of Hamby’s research impact is her partnership with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit where she’s conducted workshops with agents training to become profilers. The workshops focus on the cognitive mechanisms underlying narrative persuasion and help new profilers understand how they can use these principles in the work they do to protect the U.S.