About a month ago, I wrote about the good kind of stress — the neuroscience of why hard things stick, why IKEA furniture you assemble yourself feels more valuable than identical pre-built pieces, and why Trader Joe's legendary parking lot chaos is a feature, not a...
There's a question I've been sitting with lately: When did we collectively decide that "good enough, but effortless" beats "excellent, but requires something of you"? Because if you look at how consumers actually behave — not what they say in surveys, but what they do...
What This Sunday's $7M Super Bowl Ads Reveal About Your Brand Every February, brands now spend around $7–8 million for 30 seconds of airtime. Most treat it as a gamble. Smart strategists treat it as the world's largest live experiment in emotional marketing. What...
For two decades, most business advice about the paradox of choice has pointed in one direction: offer less. The famous jam study showed 24 varieties = 3% conversion, 6 varieties = 30% conversion. The lesson seemed clear. Trader Joe's built an empire on 4,000 SKUs...
If the memory of that first cassette resonates, you were born before 1996. Do you remember your first one? Not the one your parents bought you—the one you discovered. The one you saved for, hunted through record bins to find, brought home like treasure. You didn't...
Diet trends affect F&B companies, but understanding the root causes and needs for the shift is an opportunity for any company targeting a specific demographic. And in the case of wellness and Gen X and millennials, who grew up proactive about their health and are...
In today’s relentlessly connected world, one thing unites us across regions, demographics, and devices: we’re stressed. The constant hum of modern life—notifications, demands, decision overload—has consumers craving one thing above all else: joy. As I explore in my...
In February, 2025, prominent North American consumer goods companies met at the Consumer Analyst Group NY conference (CAGNY). This presentation explores how some of the best-in-class companies are responding to evolving consumer preferences, leveraging technology, and...
GLP-1 is creating new challenges and opportunities for food and beverage manufacturers, supplement companies, and retailers. It is a truly disruptive landscape, and companies have to address the skinny elephant in the room.
The Toy Association's Toy Fair is an iconic tradeshow taking place in New York, NY and catering to anyone in the ecosystem of play: manufacturers, buyers, distributors, inventors, designers, licensors, licensees and creators. The $104 billion global toy economy is...
