Stephen Kraus

What is your origin story and how has your work-life journey led you to USF?

I come from a very academic family. My dad was an English professor, my mom taught first grade, and my sister was a sociologist. I was 16  before I realized people actually have to work in the summer! I went to the University of Florida and studied psychology, then got my PhD at Harvard when I was 25, so I always tell my students that I peaked at 25. Then, I taught psychology at the University of Florida for a few years. All through grad school, professors had said I’d graduate at the perfect time, when the older cohort of psychologists would retire and jobs would open up. Then the laws changed, and they outlawed mandatory retirement, so all of those people stayed and the job market was terrible. 

I saw three listings for market research firms at the back of the APA Monitor [a publication of the American Psychological Association], so I decided to apply and was surprised to get two phone calls, which was a welcome change from academia! I worked in market research for 30 years, studying consumer, lifestyle, demographic, and consumer psyche trends. In 2019, I was working for a startup and loving it. It was so exciting; it was going places and starting to hockey stick, and we were profitable way ahead of schedule. We were owned by a larger company and there was a social media kerfuffle. The owner company said they were behind us completely on Monday and by that Friday, everyone was laid off and our stock options were worthless. My plan in 2020 had been to speak at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival and the World Retail Congress in Milan, and this was supposed to be the great final chapter of my career. 

So that was January 2020, and then in March 2020, the pandemic hit. I did census research for a while and had gotten to know Nick Imparato, who was chair of the department here. I’d given a talk at a conference and he asked me to give a guest lecture, I said ok, then he asked me to work as an adjunct, I said ok. I had always joked that I wanted to retire to a business school, and that’s essentially what happened, even though I never took a business class throughout undergraduate or graduate school. 

I became a full-time faculty member four years ago. I love it here, I love teaching and doing little comedy routines, seeing students get excited. I teach a lot in our MSMI [Master of Science in Marketing Intelligence] program and really enjoy that because I get to see the social mobility of students. Three fourths of our students are international, and maybe they have some experience abroad, but this is often discounted by US employers. But when students come here and get their degree, employers start to look at their past experience differently and they end up in really good places. I think about a student who now works as a project manager at Amazon and what this will mean for her family and future generations. I see this especially at graduation when I get to meet all the parents, and they’re so proud. 

 

What experiences or events have had the most influence on your endeavors as a teacher?

I do a TikTok challenge where I put students into teams and they have to compete to create a new TikTok account that gets the most views. I used to not give them any direction and let them make mistakes, but now I’ve been coaching them at the beginning about what I’ve seen that works and what doesn’t to see if they can get farther. 

Just today, I was thinking about the election and how people are talking about the “plight of young men” and the narrative around young men being lost. I thought, I see that everyday in class. We talk about a lot of social and cultural trends and how women are outperforming men on every metric of academic success. I do a lot of group projects and see students self-select by gender, and then the women get together and collaborate and talk, while the guys often don’t focus or work as a team or put in extra effort. Often guys will want to communicate via a Google Doc rather than sitting around a table and discussing things. For many young men, it’s not cool to be engaged or try hard or be interested in things. Of course, it’s always an over-generalization to say that men and women differ in some way. But there is a kernel of truth here. So I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and trying to be more intentional about how to raise the engagement level among male students. I suspect they aren’t “lost,” just mis-understood in some way I don’t fully understand yet. I am trying to listen to them more carefully.

Please share a classroom or teaching moment that brought you joy.

I had a cool experience where an undergrad student came up to me after class and told me she had met someone at a networking event. They had been communicating with her a lot and planned to meet but she wasn’t sure if it was a job interview. She showed me their communication and I said, “Yes, that’s a job interview!” It would have been a new field for her, so I asked her about her current job and worked with her to identify her transferable skills. I said, “It sounds like you deal with difficult clients, or have you ever had to motivate employees?” and shared other ideas that transferred over. I’ve never had to tell someone how to do that because to me it is implicit knowledge, but it was cool to see the light go off in her head. She asked what her attitude should be going in, and I said, “You’re a star and they would be lucky to have you!” I realized she just needed a pep talk and she ended up getting the job. It made me realize that I don’t know what students don’t know and I have so much advice for job interviews that I can share. 

 

How has your research and experience in digital media, market research, social trends, and generational marketing informed your perspectives on today’s students, or teaching and learning?

I love books, and I love science. I was a huge Mr. Spock fan and lived way out in the country without cable TV, so that’s how I got engaged in books. My dad wrote book reviews, so we’d get a huge box of books from different publishers hoping he would review them and I’d just tear into them. So I was up to speed on Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle and whatever else was trending in the 1970s, but from a skeptical, science-based perspective. And that’s what I do now! I try to teach students to be excited about science or data, and how to tell a story. Students need critical thinking: the business world was full of products that flopped because they weren’t marketed well. There’s that Thoreau quote, “If a man builds a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to his door.” This is completely false. My students have marketing presentations next week and I’m encouraging them to use the TED talk model, where they need to have some humor and tell a cohesive and compelling story.

What endeavor(s) do you see on the horizon that you are particularly excited about?

Right now I’m writing a textbook about consumer behavior. When I read the textbooks out there now, I don’t find anything that someone in marketing would actually use. They’re overly theoretical, dry, and boring. But marketing is about human behavior and there should be a zillion interesting anecdotes! 

I’m good at synthesizing info and telling a story, and that’s what teaching is. So this is what I’m trying to do with my book. It will be 200 pages, info-graphicy, the first textbook written with Gen Z in mind. I also think about how to get people engaged in reading again. They’re engaged by short videos, so we need to meet them where they are, but I believe in the power of books (as the son of an English professor). I want my students to be able to read a book and tell me the main ideas. My students have to do in-person, hand-written tests with essay questions given to them in advance. What is the main point? What are three things you learned from this book? I’m trying to make books more engaging to students.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is broad consumer trends as the played out within the election. I summarize it this way – There are three Americas: people who drive for DoorDash, people who order DoorDash, and whoever owns Doordash. The people who own Doordash are doing great – it’s a great time to be a billionaire. but a lot of people have shifted from second America down to first America – metaphorically-speaking, people who used to order DoorDash, but now drive for DoorDash. There’s been a dramatic downward mobility – both in current jobs, and in hopes for the future. People say, “I voted the way I did because of inflation.” But I don’t think they literally mean inflation over the last two years; they mean a falling standard of living over the last 50 years. The bottom 80% of the country hasn’t had a raise in 50 years, and this translates to five decades of wage stagnation. It is now very difficult to be a person without a college degree who can support a family with a manufacturing job. When people say they voted the way they did, it’s a much bigger thing. This is the kind of broad trend that marketers in business think about. If there are now three Americas, then companies have to respond to the reality of this new economy. Procter and Gamble became the biggest advertiser in the world by creating brands for the great American middle class. That doesn’t exist anymore.

 

The breadth of your work seems to reflect a more fundamental motivation to promote scientific thinking. Was there something in your experience that made you focus here?

There’s so much talk about fake news today, and, as Hannah Arendt suggests, getting people to believe nothing is the first step to getting people to believe anything. When I first started teaching about income concentration, that the rich are getting richer and the middle class is shrinking, some people just dismissed this as a “political point of view.” So I show students the most objective sources of data to make it clear that this is an observation of fact and not an opinion. When people don’t believe in climate change, it may not be politically correct to say this, but they’re wrong. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in evolution or gravity – they are real (let’s be clear – I’m not recommending this as Democratic talking points for the next election). But the broader idea here is that there’s a strong anti-science trend in American society today that troubles me. 

I remember when I was young in Pennsylvania, there was a lot said about acid rain. The government commissioned a study to see if that was real, and they found that it really was happening, and the results were published in journals. So then with facts, the government could actually do something about it, even if there were different opinions about what to do. Democrats and Republicans eventually worked together and solved the problem. But only because they could first agree that there was a problem. We’ve lost the ability to agree on a set of facts and then work together toward a path forward. I try to teach my students how to use the methods of science to understand human behavior, and take effective action as a result. Perhaps that’s the Mr. Spock in me!