McIntire’s COMM 3330 isn’t your ordinary introductory Marketing Research course: Professor Derick Davis’s class offers undergrads a gateway to practical experience and applications central to successful business insights. Emphasizing skills on the subject’s fundamental philosophies and methodologies, it provides essential understanding for making smart marketing management decisions. Students are equipped to scrutinize research relevance, reliability, and validity, empowering them to develop the skill set to conduct their own significant primary data collection via interviews, surveys, and experiments.
This spring marked the course’s second edition of a notable collaboration with innovative annuities and investment platform Gainbridge. The strategic partnership tasks students with considering some of the company’s own challenges, pushing them to capture excess cash flow being drawn by individuals over the age of 59½ from their investment retirement accounts.
As Davis asserts, “The Gainbridge corporate sponsorship transforms Marketing Research from theory into professional experience, with students tackling current marketing challenges using traditional research and AI-powered methods.”
In April, students took to Zoom to share their findings directly with a Gainbridge executive eager to hear their recommendations. Applying McIntire’s leading business education to industry opportunities underscores how Davis’s course is connecting academic principles with strategic, impactful business solutions. We spoke with three of his spring 2025 students who examined issues for Gainbridge throughout the semester.
Exploring Diverse Marketing Possibilities
To best approach this strategic collaboration, Davis split his students into three groups, assigning each one a distinct research project for Gainbridge.
Caelin Rowell (McIntire ’26) and her team, for instance, focused on the nuanced messaging strategies that could optimize Gainbridge’s reach to individuals nearing retirement age. “We considered questions like, ‘What messaging can Gainbridge best use? What is going to be most attractive to best target their intended age group?’” she explains.
Caelin Rowell
“Then we had more specific questions: ‘Are they going to be able to market to them at golf tournaments? Would that resonate with people?’ That was probably one of the more niche parts of our question,” Rowell reflects about the tailored approach their investigation required.
Asked to discern customer preferences, Dylan Maruri (McIntire ’26) and his group aimed to convert certificate of deposit investors into Gainbridge’s annuity products. Maruri observed the complexity of their task in creating effective surveys on which to base their ultimate proposals, signifying the growing pains that come with understanding marketing intricacies, especially when dealing with products that are understandably foreign to people in their early 20s.
Charlotte Galloway (McIntire ’25, M.S. in Accounting ’26) agrees: “Most of Gainbridge’s services are retirement-focused or later-in-life products that you think about as you near the end of your career. Our group had the most difficulty trying to put ourselves in the shoes of someone in that mindset, trying to think about investments and how to prepare for retirement.” Despite that, her team explored “the effectiveness of [Gainbridge’s] current sports sponsorships, advertisements, the use of different celebrity sports ambassadors, and how that translates to improving their market share,” Galloway says. She also points out that the company regularly attaches their name to a handful of sporting events and maintains a permanent sponsorship with naming rights to the Gainbridge Field House, home of the NBA’s Indiana Pacers and WNBA’s Indiana Fever.
As each group delved into their project’s distinct business questions, the division of those specific issues fostered a multifaceted learning experience for all involved.
Crafting Survey Solutions
Like her classmates, Rowell too found the greatest challenge to be her unfamiliarity with Gainbridge’s offerings, how they conduct their business, and how the students could abide by those conventions. Yet she praises Davis for his detailed survey feedback to keep her group on track as it prepared to conduct its research: “He pointed out nuances like question consistency, which we hadn’t considered,” she says, recalling that they abruptly changed the number of criteria for responders to choose from in their survey. “It’s such a minute thing that hadn’t crossed our minds, but as you’re taking a survey, you take it in kind of a rhythmic way, and that switch could bump off the rhythm.”
Maruri and his team faced hurdles due to a combination of interest and resource constraints. Despite this, Maruri highly valued Davis’s involvement, particularly his feedback on refining surveys. “He has a really good scope of the overview and of the big picture. When we were very focused, he was very much on top of the whole thing, which made us better surveyors,” Maruri reflects, emphasizing the constructive guidance received, which enhanced their methodological prowess.
Charlotte Galloway
Galloway’s group faced the aforementioned generational gap but overcame it through interviews with older professionals as “a good starting point to understand their perspective and what they look for in a retirement product.” In using the Engage AI platform, people responded to their questionnaire, with tech refining their queries on retirement-focused investments, Galloway says. “The AI chatbot curates questions based on what you input, and based on what the respondent is typing to follow your question leads, AI feedback helped us design more insightful surveys.”
She also appreciated the in-class walkthroughs of AI and Qualtrics platforms introduced by Davis and found it rewarding to see how the survey results could potentially inform Gainbridge’s strategic direction. “It’s refreshing to be encouraged to use AI where it’s appropriate, and it was exciting to see all that AI can do. I’ve never been exposed to that before,” she says.
Supportive Instruction for Enhanced Learning
At the center of this project is Davis, whose methodical and pragmatic teaching fosters important student skill development through the study of essential tools, with class sessions defined by detailed analysis and robust discussions. Rowell highlights the course’s open dialogue between professor and students, noting, “Professor Davis is very good about being available to students. In the classroom, he facilitates learning as he does conversation, making it an easy place to engage in discussions.”
Maruri valued Davis’s detailed and timely feedback and his understanding about the high bar McIntire students set for themselves. “Davis is wonderful,” he says without reservation. “He was always there to help us through any rough patches and got back to us really quickly. In class, he gave us mini-lessons, which I found particularly helpful.”
Galloway acknowledges that the exposure to marketing cases and sharing points of view with both Davis and her peers enriched her team’s research methods. “We read a lot of business cases in class, so it was always interesting to hear Professor Davis’s insights as well as those from the class,” she says. “We always talked about what companies could have done better to build a more effective survey. Everything we did in class had a helpful takeaway, and I learned a lot that I applied to the project.”
Davis continues to refine the Marketing Research course and expand the possibilities of what it can offer to corporate sponsors interested in supporting both data collection and the opportunity to share their business challenges with future students. His students, having delivered promising insights to Gainbridge, now look ahead with the confidence and experience gained from solving real-world marketing challenges.
