As entrepreneurs, we've learned to listen to our intuition and when something feels right Arianne says she feels it in her bones. However, intuition and gut feelings shouldn't drive your communication strategy. Dr. Coy Callison heads the research lab at Texas Tech University's Communication Research Center where they run a variety of experiments to test the effectiveness of different communication assets. During our chat we discuss:

The complexity of attitude formation, behavior, and memory-recall and you shouldn't just wing these things!
The types of research Dr. Callison conducts and the data they glean.
The dangers in simply mimicking the communication strategies that others are doing.
Some of Dr. Callison's top takeaways from his research...one has to do with beer!
The power of moral appeals to behavior change.

Meet Coy: Dr. Coy Callison is a full professor and the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in the College of Media and Communications at Texas Tech University. His research typically focuses on source and message factors and their interaction with cognitive tendencies and saliency factors underlying the attentiveness of individual audience members. His academic research has appeared in Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, and Media Psychology among others. He has worked professionally in newspaper, corporate and non-profit public relations, and media consulting in addition to his earning a Ph.D. in Communication and Information Sciences from the University of Alabama. In addition to having published more than 50 peer-reviewed research articles and given more than 70 peer-reviewed peer-reviewed presentations, his funded research projects have investigated strategic water conservation messaging and health communication.

EP111: The Water Squad’s Guide to Data-Driven Communication