My Daily Emails

If a user succeeds once, they’re far more likely to stick around (and tell others). Behavioral science keeps proving this. I wrote last week about how future-focused or abstract messaging actually

Buyers don’t automatically trust what a product does. They need to know HOW it does it. A 2025 MIT/Wharton experiment found that when companies reveal how an output is generated (even if the explanation

If you manufacture in China but don’t sell there, you may think you’re safe. You’re not. A surprising number of product makers assume their trademark protects them globally. But it

Last year’s Black Friday broke records. But for most makers, it’s not make-or-break. Here’s what happened in 2024: U.S. online sales that day hit $10.8 billion, a 10.2% increase over the

Gratitude is the antidote to almost everything negative … and the fuel behind everything constructive. Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers! It’s a day when brands blast out thank-you

Authenticity just became an even bigger selling feature. A 2025 arXiv study found that people (and even AI tools) can only tell fake product reviews from real ones about half the time. That’s

The most persuasive thing a brand can say is the truth that stands to hurt its pitch. I was surprised to read this in an email from Backblaze, the cloud backup

Haptics just jumped from niche tech to Costco shelves, and that changes everything. I recently wrote about the haptic F1 movie trailer you could feel through your phone. And then Costco handed

The moment you touch a new product, the story you’ve built in your head gets rewritten. I’ve been eagerly waiting for the prototype of a product I’m helping launch. Even

Big innovation rarely comes from big teams. Every startup founder dreams of becoming HUGE. But a recent Forbes article found that the most successful consumer brands are scaling innovation through micro-teams. Those are

Seven days out, plan to make buying and fulfilling easy, and to avoid torching margin. Black Friday is ridiculously stressful for many product makers. It doesn’t have to be. Decide

If people don’t assume your product is high-end, delaying the price reveal can be an unpleasant surprise. Startup founder Dwight in San Diego wrote in response to my post about

In product innovation, speed-to-market now outperforms scale. A new Siemens report found that the consumer goods brands winning today aren’t the ones launching more products. Nope. They happen to be the ones launching products faster.

If buyers expect your product to be expensive, making them wait for the price can make them want it more. New research in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that when shoppers

You remember old phone numbers but not the client you called yesterday, because your brain lets Google do the storing. Here’s an oddity: I can easily recite the land-line numbers

At this year’s IFA in Berlin, the smartest upgrade was not hardware. It was longevity. Samsung led with products like its Bespoke AI Dishwasher, promising years of software updates and smarter maintenance.

Too many choices can quietly kill your conversion rate. I’ve written plenty about how Costco increases sales by reducing choices. A new wave of research from UCLA Anderson Review and lseee.net shows that even three options

The fastest way to build trust might be telling buyers what your product won’t do. New 2025 research on brand transparency shows something neat: When brands clearly state their limits,

Turning Grand Central Station into a pine forest might be the best sensory play of the season. Bath & Body Works is running a campaign that makes parts of New

The most polarizing products sometimes become the most profitable. A super-creepy doll.A blanket with sleeves.A pen “for women.” All ridiculous … until you see the sales numbers. None of them

In life and in marketing, silence is one of the most poignant signals there is. Every year on November 11, I stop what I’m doing at 11:00 am. That two

Your product’s sound shapes trust faster than your logo ever could. The best brands know: sound is feel, presented as audio. The soft, sure “thunk” when a car door closes.The whispery

Don’t stop at solving problems. Evoke wonder! Recent research shows that awe is more than a feeling. It’s a cognitive reset. It widens perception, opens people to novelty, and deepens emotional attachment.

Before a buyer reads the label, they’ve already judged your product by touch. A new design study confirms what great makers have always felt intuitively: the visual–tactile properties of materials significantly shape

Your brand only has two seconds to earn a glance. On a good day. A new deep-learning study on visual attention in packaging found that logo placement, orientation, and even nearby faces

With endless buzzes, chimes and beeps, haptics can carry meaning — if you let them. If you felt your phone rumble like a Formula One racer from this summer’s F1 haptic movie

AI systems that “feel magical” can also be seen as manipulative. Recent research from Griffith University shines light on a growing issue:  AI-induced consumer vulnerability: the uneasy sense people get

Even the biggest brands can forget to state the obvious. A few weeks ago, Lay’s announced what it called the largest brand redesign in its nearly 100-year history. The radical new changes? Warmer

When we buy into a product brand, we buy membership in a story. One of the strongest emotional glues in human behavior is belonging. We invest in brands that connect us:

There are 60 days left in 2025. Most founders will use them to plan. The leaders will ship. As the calendar tightens, something strange happens in our brains. Deadlines stop

The day after Halloween is always the same: too much sugar, too little clarity. Everything’s sticky, dirty costumes are on the floor, and no one completely agrees which houses gave

Halloween is one night when strangers still open doors for each other. My wife and I still take our girls trick-or-treating. We know these years are numbered: soon they’ll be

In 2026, your product may talk — not via voice, but via persuasion cues. Conversational AI uses framing and nudges to steer choices. Increasingly, physical products are borrowing those same tactics.

For humans surrounded by constant pings and alerts, calm is the new luxury. Calm technology (design that stays in the background until it’s truly needed) is quietly coming back into style.

Reader Veronica from San Francisco asked: does “premium” wording work for software too? It does, with a few extra levers. The same psychology I wrote about a couple days ago

Simply asking “Hey, how likely are you to buy this?” raises the odds someone actually WILL. In behavioral psychology, the mere-measurement effect describes how measuring a person’s intention influences their subsequent behavior.

The words you use can change how your product feels. And how it sells. A blind-test study found that when two identical orange juices were labeled differently (one “Regular,” the

Sometimes when I’m stuck on a project, I realize I’m looping the same thoughts. That’s usually my signal to step away, because instead of solving the problem, I’m worsening it.

WD-40 didn’t just listen to customers — they solved their own frustration. For decades, the biggest problem with WD-40 wasn’t what was inside the can. It was that darned little red straw.

Your first 10 reviews may matter more than your 1,000th. A stack of glowing reviews does something bigger than reassure buyers. It creates a bandwagon. Researchers Xiao & Myers call it the bandwagon

Imagine a product that quietly (but verifiably) shifts your mood while you use it. Unilever is deeply exploring neurosignalling. Engineering products to trigger emotional states through subtle sensory cues. A lotion

The smarter your product, the harder it gets to explain. Reader Paul in London asked about building a content strategy for a complex tech company — the kind where even

Creativity can do more to drive purchases. It’s all about fresh thinking, and timing. Outside select Kroger stores, Oreo and VML turned crosswalks into cookie ads. Painted black-and-white stripes became Oreo stacks, with cartoon faces “biting”

An “Are you sure you want to leave?” message might be doing more damage than good. A new study of AI companion apps shows a common persuasion trick: when users

Reader Lara in Orlando asked: “If rounded offers invite haggling, what about products with fixed prices, like retail or D2C?” Great question. I wrote about how Columbia University research showed

How pricing that’s too “smart” can backfire on brand loyalty. A new study warns that dynamic pricing without fairness guardrails can trigger backlash. Think airline tickets. You might think you got

The world’s safest kid-saw tells you exactly HOW to push design limits without breaking trust. One of 2025’s most buzzed design innovations is not a phone or smartwatch. It has

How mood and environment silently throttle product desire. A new psychology study finds that when people feel their environment is harsh (unsafe, unstable, resource-scarce) they actually feel the need for

The right words can help make even the most ambitious products take flight. On today’s episode of Product: Knowledge podcast, I talk with Ali Rakhimov — product manager, entrepreneur, and author of Make Pigs Fly —

A world leader is betting on AI to create the next generation of ice cream… and that should make every product maker pay attention. Unilever is spinning off its Magnum Ice