My Daily Emails

New research links getting a smartphone before 13 with dramatically worse mental health in young adulthood… and the younger the child, the worse the association is. My daughters were the

Affluent customers might welcome AI assistants, but premium service means knowing when a human needs to take over. Luxury service has traditionally meant high touch. Like a concierge who remembers your preferences or the salesperson who knows your size by heart. Maybe the hotel that anticipates what you’ll need before you step onto the shiny tiles. But the luxury consumers I know are also super-interested in AI agents and automation. Why wouldn’t they be? If an agent can book the restaurant, change the flight, locate the exact product, arrange delivery and save 20 minutes of pointless back-and-forth, that’s an all-round better experience. What they’re paying for is access to fantastic service, not max human interaction. A recent study in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services provides some neat support for that idea. Researchers examined attitudes toward AI assistants among luxury consumers in South Korea, a market with unusually high luxury spending and technology adoption. They found that emotional appeal and perceived social presence both helped drive acceptance of AI assistants. Trust also played an important role. But one other

Kate Moss wore Hunter boots to Glastonbury in ’05 because the field was mucky. Twenty-one years later, that spontaneous choice is still sellin’ the Wellies. Hunter turns 170 this year,

Meta is making virtual reality dramatically lighter and more affordable. The big engineering challenge is making folks around the wearer comfortable. Meta just showed off the coolest VR hardware it

After over a century of levity, The Laughing Cow has changed one of its most recognizable brand assets and refuses to say why. Exactly a month ago, I wrote about

New research suggests mind wandering can actually increase purchase intent when the purchase is still some distance away. Marketers put tons of effort into trying to STOP you and me

New research suggests recent consumption has an outsized effect on what people buy next, especially when uncertainty is high. My kids love goin’ to Costco, especially when they know there’ll

More than 20 years after turning “easy” into an office icon, Staples has created its opposite. Decades ago, we had a Staples Easy Button in our boardroom. Colleagues and clients loved slapping

The new Tread Flex solves two obvious barriers to treadmill ownership: space and price. Peloton’s Miley launch ad somehow makes both easy to miss. My wife and I are unusually

Five months after activists opened a fake Lululemon store in London, the parody brand is still online, but there’s no sign the stunt itself caused Lululemon’s sales slide. As a

Hard Mountain Dew has put a bounty on Bigfoot, turning an impossible challenge into a promotion folks want to participate in. A couple months ago, I wrote about Columbia Sportswear

Novig’s Sydney Sweeney campaign is a useful reminder that attention only works when you’re comfortable with who it attracts and who it pushes away. Sydney Sweeney has done it again.

Shopify merchants can now set up ChatGPT ads in the platform, but the real story is how AI is changing product discovery. Shoppers increasingly ask ChatGPT questions like: What’s the

New neuroscience proves the clearer your position, the easier the decision. Here’s an experiment I love. Researchers recently showed people circles filled with hundreds of parallel lines. Each participant had

Starbucks offers a useful warning about the difference between understanding how businesses work and knowing how to make one work. During Laxman Narasimhan’s 17 months running Starbucks, the company lost

It takes a ton of work to make a brand extension like this seem like it belongs. But it does for a reason. Maybe I live under a rock, but

One of IKEA’s weirdest brand quirks has become a game, and a pretty good lesson in how to turn confusion into engagement. I’ve joked before about IKEA’s remarkable ability to

The Sienna’s built-in FridgeBox is a cool feature. Toyota’s new ice cream collaboration makes you immediately know why you need one. A freezer in a minivan is pretty cool. Literally,

One bite-sized decision made Apple’s logo unmistakable. And decades of brand building packed it with meaning. During a branding discussion a few days ago, I recalled a story about the

Nearly a century after turning the sound of Rice Krispies into a brand asset, Kellogg’s commissioned a cereal bowl designed to amp it up. This is so gloriously unnecessary. Kellogg’s

New research shows that uncertainty makes a reward more desirable. Imagine two people each receive a $20 gift card. One is simply handed the card. The other spins a prize wheel

The World Cup gave Coca-Cola a sales surge, plus something that could keep paying off for years. I’m not a huge Coke drinker. Or even a massive soccer fan. Sorry.

New research suggests near-expiry discounts can accidentally make buyers worry about how other people will judge them. I’ve occasionally bought meat or some other perishable product with one of those

IKEA’s new Swedish billboard campaign exposes the messy reality behind a neat room, and turns storage into the hero. My family owns dozens and dozens of IKEA storage bins. That’s

Giving customers a way OUT can make them more willing to get IN. Tesla‘s new Cybercab has a physical Stop button mounted between the dome lights. Press it and the

The $499 CameraJet toothbrush is absurdly over-engineered. Dyson’s intense new ad makes that the whole point. When I first saw Dyson’s new CameraJet, I thought it looked sorta like a

The next smart-home breakthrough may be making the WHOLE house intelligent (and private) instead of adding another device to it. My house is reasonably smart. It also has no frigging

New research shows creating a physical version of a digital product can undermine the qualities that made the original desirable. Imagine Nike releases a virtual sneaker. It’s scarce. It changes

The $3,995 Lamborghini stroller shows what happens when a luxury brand transfers its status, design language and scarcity into a totally different product. Your kid could sport a Lamborghini roughly

A 30-year-old mapping brand made one choice at exactly the right moment, and suddenly it’s the #1 downloaded app. Remember MapQuest? I used it constantly in the strange little window

Amazon makes shopping absurdly easy. A new FTC lawsuit asks whether it made competing for visibility unnecessarily expensive. My household is a power-user of Amazon. We love local businesses and

New research suggests AI influencers become MORE persuasive when they stop pretending to be real people. AI influencers are popping up everywhere, from Instagram to TikTok, and brands are investing

Stress balls are ancient by toy-industry standards. NeeDoh shows what happens when an old need collides with social media, collectibility and a particularly stressed-out culture. Somewhere along the way, the

Beni suggests surveillance tech becomes easier to accept when its purpose, personality and boundaries are obvious. I’ve been writing a lot lately about cameras moving onto our bodies. Meta puts

Our increasingly connected lives are creating a new category of products designed to help us disconnect. I grew up when a phone was attached to the wall. That was the

Tech companies have discovered that cameras on your face become easier to normalize when they look less like surveillance equipment and more like fashion. For years, the biggest problem with

The Laughing Cow turned its most recognizable product into a vehicle, proving the package is the advertising. I saw this thing and immediately thought of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. Exceptin’

Sometimes a tiny flaw makes a product more desirable than perfection. If you’re a coin collector, you already know this: The coins worth the most are often the ones that

Apple may be late to foldable phones, but watch its arrival reset what consumers expect to pay for one. Samsung launched its first Galaxy Fold in 2019. Apple sat back

Casio’s new F-B100W shows how innovation can mean adding exactly enough technology, then stopping. The Casio F-91W is one of those rare products that seems almost immune to progress. It

More (and longer) reviews don’t mean better customer insight. The opposite could be true. One of the biggest claims of AI is that it helps people express themselves more clearly.

With fun ideas like the Love Lid, Heinz turns a condiment into something people can talk about, personalize and play with. I seem to write about Heinz a lot, which is weird

The highest compliment for a brand is hearing customers repeat its positioning back to you. For 14 years, My wife and I drove a Volvo. One thing kept surprising us.

New research found that more immersive tech doesn’t always mean more buyers. Every few months, another company announces a bold new virtual reality shopping experience. The assumption is easy enough

The most revealing response to a rebrand isn’t outrage. It’s indifference. There was a time when Instagram changing its logo was front-page marketing news. People went on about it for

One wee packaging change might sell more peanut butter than a new logo ever could. Jif has unveiled its first major packaging redesign in more than 30 years. Some people

Lots of companies try to use anchoring. Very few execute it to perfection. In 1974, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published one of the most famous studies ever in behavioral economics. Participants watched

The marketing strategy that built one company could sink another. One of the most-read chapters in I Need That is called You’re Not Apple. The point wasn’t that startups shouldn’t admire Apple. Many

New Shopify data shows shoppers arriving through AI are growing fast, and converting WAY more than human ones. If you still think agentic shopping is something marketers can worry about

The best partnerships reinforce why your customers buy in the first place. My family and I love Disneyland. Like millions of others, we discovered that its famous tagline, “The Happiest Place