My Daily Emails

Contrast can be a powerful device. Valentine’s Day always triggers plenty of brand choreography. Applebee’s brings back its Date Night Pass.Sam’s Club sells a perfectly engineered steak-in-a-box. All competent. And totally expected.

New research says the fastest way to earn trust after a mistake is to ask for less, not more. Returns are usually treated as damage control. Something went wrong. So

My best thinking doesn’t happen at my desk. Every morning I go for a 20-minute walk with one rule: no devices. Just walking and thinking. It is reliably when ideas

Tariffs have turned where you make things into a central part of the buying decision. Last year, tariff escalations dramatically changed how buyers read price. Shoppers went looking for explanations

Vision scales demos, touch scales reality. For years, robots have been learning to see. Cameras got better vision. Processing models got faster. Datasets got bigger. And still, real-world manipulation stayed

If you’re not sure what “agentic commerce” even means, you’re not behind, and that gap is exactly why adoption is slow. Let me start by explaining the term, because many

Speed feels good … until something goes off the rails real fast. You may have noticed something changing in big U.S. retailers without much fanfare.  Target and Walmart have been pulling back on

Too many returns can mean buyers aren’t getting the information they need. I worry about returns because they cost my clients real money. In shipping and restocking, plus waste, write-offs,

When a category disappears, it leaves behind memories. And new opportunity. I have piles of memories tied to frozen cylinders of juice. My first lemonade stand. Stirring and stirring in

A reader asked a smart question about whether seasonality still matters for products built around gifts or specific times of year. Shara from Austin wrote after my post Selling No Longer

Some physical products (and their customers) benefit from never feeling fully “sold.” I’ve worked with a company that sells a wellness hardware product with a subscription model … and the

Buyers aren’t idiots, and they know it. An appliance retailer near me ran ads reminding consumers that the expected life of a dishwasher is five years. A salesperson in a

Demand is now reacting in hours … not months. New retail data out of 2025 shows something uncomfortable for planners. Buying behavior has become a lot less seasonal and way

Going public has warped how we talk about growth. And that’s a problem. When brands like Peloton hit a ceiling, shareholders get pissed. The assumption is that growth should ALWAYS

Most new offerings don’t fail because they’re bad, but because they’re nowhere near good enough. In I Need That, I talk about the 10X Revelation: the jarring truth that an innovative product

Some part shortages fly under the radar. This one doesn’t. Over the last year or so, computer memory stopped behaving like a boring tech commodity. Prices spiked and lead times

Yesterday Amazon confirmed what buyers have been showing us for years: screens didn’t replace stores, but exposed what stores still do best. For a decade, “digital-first” was treated like destiny.

This is the flip side of the volatility I wrote about the other day. In that note, I talked about how retail demand no longer moves in seasons. It moves

This year’s show wasn’t focused on better screens or smarter apps. It was more about machines doing real work in human spaces. CES 2026 made something unmistakable: AI is stepping

If you’re scratching your head about why “Canada just made an EV deal with China,” you’re not alone. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a landmark trade agreement with China that

Vision needs oxygen, but it also needs gravity. Reader Terry from New York wrote me after my recent post Every Inventor Needs a Trusted Skeptic, and his question is a good one. “I

Uncertainty talks. Behavior decides. Lately, I keep hearing the same refrain, especially from Millennials. Cutting back. Tightening budgets. Buying less. Then I looked at the numbers. Planned holiday spending among

Could the most powerful signal a brand sends be the one it never planned? Reader Alex from Cleveland wrote me after my Knorr post and asked something intriguing: “You wrote about cooking

Buyers dislike higher prices, but they do expect them. This month, Dollar Tree stores in the U.S. began adding items in the $10 range. That would have been unthinkable not very long ago.

Pre-orders are becoming one of the safest ways to launch physical products. I have seen this pattern increase across categories. When given the option, many customers legitimately like to pre-order. Not begrudgingly

Belief builds products, and objectivity gets them bought. I recently worked with an inventor developing really cool new product. Let’s call it a compact water filtration system, to protect the

Mid-January is often when supply reality catches up with roadmaps. This time, things are tougher than ever. Late last year, a major constraint tightened across consumer hardware. Global memory shortages,

Even in 2026, necessity and value beat novelty way more often than we want to think. I see a contrarian signal hiding in plain sight right now. Despite all the

Proximity is becoming a feature, not an afterthought, and buyers appreciate the difference immediately. In my home city, a new carbon fiber manufacturing facility is about to start production. It

Loyalty can stall because the product works too well. My wife and I were talking yesterday about Peloton. We’ve had our bikes for six years now. They work great. No complaints.

Digital payments change buyer psychology long before logic shows up at the party. I’ve been a fan of wireless payments via Apple Watch for nearly a decade. I still love

Procrastination has become the silent competitor in modern product markets. I have been catching myself doing this more often lately. I shortlist a product. I am 99% convinced it is

Other humans feel the difference even before they know why. Lately I have been noticing something in my social feeds. Sensing it with my gut before my brain catches up.

Speed only helps if you are aiming in the right direction. I was reading a recent Consumer Goods piece quoting James Quincey, CEO of The Coca-Cola Co., and one line stuck with me. “If

Almost everything we call a “need” is a story our mind learned to believe. In I Need That, I talk about how quickly our definition of “need” shifts. Indoor plumbing was

Knorr proved something every product maker needs to hear repeatedly: the value is in WHO the product helps buyers become. A global Unilever study found that 93% of Gen Z singles

Some memories are sticky because they touch something buried deeper than logic. When January 3 shows up on my calendar every year, it always conjures memories of Miro. Not Joan Miró.

Shoppers don’t give any Fs about heritage when the search results tell a better story. A recent Consumer Goods report caught my attention because it quantifies a shift I have been watching

New Year’s Day is the peak moment for imagining a better version of ourselves … and products speaking to THAT identity win. Happy New Year! Every January 1, something unique

On the last day of ’25, it is worth asking one question most founders avoid. Today represents the hinge between what your customers have tolerated and what they will no

Your instinct to add more is EXACTLY what makes buyers hesitate. Not long ago I presented a Go-to-Market Roadmap to a fascinating founder. Genuinely brilliant. Original thinker. A rare kind

People buy the product everyone else seems to be buying. A 2025 study by Xiao and Myers tested something most founders sense but rarely quantify: When review volume is high

Some days on the calendar can get swallowed by the season … but the people behind them do not. December 28 is my sister’s birthday. She’s only 15 months older

Horizontal placement changes perceived value before a buyer even reads the number. A while back I wrote about vertical price placement and how numbers placed above a product feel higher,

Boxing Day in Canada is a little different: less frenzy, more breathing room. While U.S. readers are still recovering from holiday chaos and reconciling Black Friday, Canadians wake up to

Today, the world feels busy…but we don’t have to be. For those who celebrate it, today is the most product-full day of the year. There’ll be new things unwrapping. And

Relief is one of the strongest buying triggers and TODAY is the perfect day to study it. There was an old Rolaids ad campaign that used to drive me nuts.

You know a shift got real when a “timeless” product finally gives in. I like me a game of Monopoly. My girls do too. So I had mixed feelings when

The person buying your product may never use it. For many products my team and I work on, we deliberately create a separate “gift buyer” persona. You can see these

On the winter solstice, it’s not that the world gets heavier … but we have less bandwidth to carry it. December 21 has always meant something special to me. It