Anyone who’s walked through the Pappajohn Business Building in recent months has been a part of the Tippie College of Business's Contemporary Topics in Marketing (MKTG:4000) class.

The building has been outfitted with a device that anonymously reads the facial expressions of people as they pass through, using software that can tell a person’s mood by scanning and analyzing the shape and position of their mouth, eyes, eyebrows, and other features without displaying or recording video. The class teaches students how to ethically gather, interpret, and analyze data and find a useful function for it, and the facial expression software provides a wealth of data for them to mine.

For instance, the students have found that people are happiest on Thursday afternoons and unhappiest on Monday mornings. They also learned how to combine the facial expression data with weather data and sales reports from Pat’s Diner, the PBB’s snack bar, to find that lousy weather puts more people in a bad mood and leads to spikes in the sale of high-calorie comfort food. Warm, sunny days, meanwhile, make people happier and lead to a decline in sales of those types of food.

“We’re the only business school in the world that has this kind of real-time facial expression software, and that gives our students an edge in learning how to use the data gathered by such an advanced tool,” says William Hedgcock, the associate professor of marketing who teaches the class.

The advanced market research course, first offered last spring, gives its 20 students hands-on experience with traditional and nontraditional research methods. Those methods include old reliables like focus groups and surveys, but also cutting-edge technologies that are changing the field of market research, like facial expression recognition software, eye tracking, and physiological data.

In fact, the technology is so cutting-edge that professional marketing firms are working with the class to utilize it for their own business purposes. Representatives from A.C. Nielsen are partnering on curriculum development, and this semester the students are working with Frank N. Magid Associates of Marion, Iowa, to design studies that test facial expression and eye-tracking software. The studies will help the firm determine the best ways to use those methods of data collection and analysis in their business of testing the effectiveness of advertisements, movie trailers, and newscasters and if they should start offering their use to clients.

The partnership also provides a real-world learning experience for the students. The class has been divided into teams, each of which is designing a research study for Magid to test the effectiveness of the technology for the firm’s use and will report their findings to the firm at the end of the semester. This provides students with valuable experience learning to design studies and present findings, as they will need to do once they’ve started their careers.