UN 423 - IJRM. Passive Power.

Rod Duclos, Associate Professor of Marketing at Ivey Business School at Western University, joins Up Next to discuss research published in April 2026 in the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM). The paper, co-authored with Amir Sepehri and Jonah Berger, draws on over 160,000 real complaints and five controlled experiments to show that the grammatical voice customers use when filing a complaint reliably predicts escalation risk before any explicit threat is made. The conversation covers the mechanism behind this signal, its limits, the looming AI confound, and what a CMO should do with it.