My Daily Emails

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

The right words can make customers start thinking, “That’s mine.” Most product descriptions follow a familiar formula. They explain WHAT a product does. Then list the key benefits. Maybe toss

The hardest way to revive a brand is by trying NOT to offend anyone. Under Armour needs younger customers. Like, desperately. Its North American sales have fallen again. Market share

The best brands find ways to insert themselves into the moments folks are ALREADY savouring. The world’s largest hot dog sculpture recently returned to New York’s Times Square. It stretches

Every year, about 30,000 new consumer products are introduced to the market, and various studies have estimated that as many as 95% ultimately fail.  Whenever I read that kind of statistic, I don’t

If AI is gonna represent your brand, it’d better do it believably. Artificial intelligence is becoming the new front line of customer interaction. Brands are giving AI assistants names, personalities

Removing tech anxiety could be the feature people want most. For years, consumer technology has competed by adding features. More cameras, sensors, AI and connectivity. Then DuckDuckGo released a pair of sunglasses

The hardest engineering challenge is earning the trust of everyone NOT wearing them. A few weeks ago, I wrote that the biggest barrier facing smart glasses isn’t battery life, display

What if the future of product ownership begins AFTER the purchase? Henry Ford worked to democratize the automobile. His goal was to make cars affordable enough that ordinary people could

IKEA found a cool way to remind us that products aren’t bought for what they are, but what they make possible. Price wars usually make numbers smaller. IKEA went and

Often the fastest path to growth is removing things. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was in deep, deep trouble. Apple’s product lineup had become a maze of

The era of “the campaign” is giving way to one of continuous experimentation, where AI creates endless variations and performance picks the winner. There are parts of marketing I really

One question can make a product start feeling like it already belongs to someone. One of the oldest (and most effective) techniques in the sales book is ridiculously simple. Instead

The strongest brands eventually stop introducing themselves. They simply remind you they’re there. Here’s a weird little family secret for ya: My daughters are in their early to mid-teen years.

New research suggests AI has a growing trust problem in marketing, with surprising revelations. Virtual influencers like Lil Miquela promised to be the future of brand influence. Perfect styling and visuals.

The highest form of branding is BEING the standard people use to describe excellence. When I bought my first custom road racing bike years ago, it came with a beautiful

Some of the biggest innovations are happening when proven technology finds a completely new home. When I think about Volkswagen, I imagine cars. Maybe SUVs or minivans. But definitely not

New research suggests authenticity alone doesn’t cut it. Winning brand stories match how buyers evaluate the product. We’ve all heard the advice, and many of us have said it more

What if the best way to attract attention is to make people work just a little harder? A few weeks ago, I wrote about Volkswagen’s legendary 1959 Think Small advertisement. It stood

AI search is changing how people discover products, and advertising will be changing with it. I received an email from OpenAI this week inviting me to create my first ChatGPT

New research shows that people with higher intelligence are more willing to adopt better solutions. I’ve written many times about status quo bias and how powerful it is in product

Children can become lifelong customers before they’re old enough to understand they’re being persuaded. A new U.S. bill is reigniting an old marketing debate. The proposed Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act

Innovation wins attention. But durability and usability earn LOYALTY. I’ve long admired James Dyson. He challenged an industry that had forever accepted mediocrity, spent years perfecting a radically different vacuum, AND

New research suggests that before your product reaches a buyer, it increasingly has to persuade a platform. There was a time not long ago when marketing seemed SO straightforward …

Even the world’s most recognizable brands keep refining what made them so famous in the first place. I grew up loving me some Coca-Cola. When New Coke replaced the original in 1985,

Algorithms are amazing at making products popular. They’re way less effective at preserving what made buyers care in the first place. I just read a great research paper on how

We all tell ourselves we’re learning from those endless business clips. New research suggests endless, rapid-fire series of shorts can do our brain more harm than good.   It feels like

Shopify’s new DoorDash integration gives independent retailers something that once belonged almost exclusively to Amazon and the biggest chains: fast local delivery. Not long ago, same-day delivery felt sort of

Great logos balance memorability with readability, and HOW your product is discovered changes how much each one matters. I’ve been working with a client on a logo for an exciting

People don’t love marketing that knows their name. They DO want products and messages that are genuinely relevant to their lives. A freshly published review in the International Journal of Research

The best brand collabs don’t have to feature the hero. Sometimes they feature the customer. My family has really gotten into the latest Spider-Man movie series starring Tom Holland. Like many fans, we’ve

Consumers don’t always need a better product. Maybe they just need a reason to take notice. There used to be a Marks & Spencer store near where I live. Loved that store,

Dynamic pricing may maximize revenue, but customers decide whether the experience still feels fair. I’m okay paying more for a thing that’s actually worth more. But I DO mind paying

Great positioning captures the change in a customer’s life, not the sophistication of the technology. One of the most admired product positioning lines ever written came from Steve Jobs during the launch

Google’s latest update closes one of the biggest measurement gaps in social media marketing. Only a week ago, I wrote about a growing problem. Brands are pouring millions into social

The best product ideas can begin with paying attention to one key insight rather than to a market report. We’ve seen a lotta celebrity product launches lately. Most are really

Apple’s latest leak likely won’t hurt iPhone sales. It does reveal something powerful about how desire gets built. A hacker recently breached Tata Electronics, exposing piles of confidential files tied to

Subscriptions are wildly profitable for businesses. But many buyers are questioning the tradeoff. Companies just LOVE subscriptions. Why wouldn’t they? Predictable recurring revenue, better forecasting, higher lifetime value. Fewer feast-or-famine

What’s inside may count, but what buyers value depends more on what their peers see. Why will someone happily drop $12K upgrading wheels, trim, and paint on a brand new

Jarlsberg’s “protein” relaunch looks sneaky to some folks, but it raises a good question: when buyer priorities change, shouldn’t your product story do the same? A social post about Jarlsberg got me

Expectation shapes experience way more than most of us realize. Why will someone spend $200 on face serum… … then buy the cheapest painkiller on the shelf? That question has

Many of us claim to be practical shoppers. Then we happily pay thousands more for something nobody has ever touched. Confession time. I talk a lot about being pragmatic, but

The next battleground for product visibility is a conversation instead of a search result. Let’s say you spent $2.3 million on influencers this year. So, your product showed up in