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 being a green flag in a dating profile, but Knorr’s logo is literally a green flag. Coincidence, or are brands sometimes sitting on symbolism they don’t even realize?” Short answer: yes, all the time. Most brands think symbolism is something you add, and sometimes it is. Like a color choice. A logo tweak. Or...
1 day ago • 1 min read
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. It feels jarring. At the same time, it is also fairly predictable. Sigh. Had to happen, right? Inflation does what it always does. It lifts baselines. The psychological floor price moves up, and buyers recalibrate even while whining about it. That tension affects product makers everywhere, not just in the...
2 days ago • 1 min read
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 or impatiently. Happily. They want a guaranteed place in line. They want to feel early and proactive … not rushed. And they want to put the ordering process behind them, now. Tools like Shopify’s pre-order and reservation plugins have made this far easier to do without surprises...
3 days ago • 1 min read
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 guilty. Who in this case is a really nice guy. Smart. Capable. Utterly convinced the market was gi-normous. His math was ambitious. Three billion possible buyers worldwide. Everyone and their dog drinks water. Everyone needs cleaner water. Therefore, EVERYONE with a wall plug-in might become a customer....
4 days ago • 1 min read
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, driven by DRAM and NAND capacity being pulled toward AI and data-center demand, began pushing up prices and stretching lead times for the kind of memory almost all embedded devices rely on. This is a structural reallocation and not a temporary hiccup. For years, memory sat in the BOM as a...
5 days ago • 1 min read
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 noise around emerging tech, retail reinvention and AI-driven everything, consumer buying behavior is staying stubbornly grounded. Value first. Essentials prioritized. Discretionary buys and upsells getting swatted away like pesky flies. McKinsey’s latest consumer research confirms what many founders feel but few plan around. Households...
6 days ago • 1 min read
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 is the first of its kind in Canada, and uses carbon from the Alberta Oil Sands, the world’s third largest proven oil reserves. One of my clients wants to be an early customer, even though their current parts come from China at a lower cost. The calculus is shifting. Near-shoring is gathering speed...
7 days ago • 1 min read
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. No big urgency to upgrade. And THAT there’s the business problem. We wondered why Peloton doesn’t offer a buy-back or trade-in program, like Levi’s, Zara, LuluLemon and Apple do. Not as a sustainability thing, but an upgrade accelerator. I suspect the fear is resale cannibalization. If used bikes flood the market, new...
8 days ago • 1 min read
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 how quick it is and many people don’t realize it’s much more secure than using a card, because a one-time token is swapped rather than disclosing my card number. But there is a subtle shift going on every time a buyer like me taps instead of hands over cash. Recent research calls it Spendception, a psychological effect where...
9 days ago • 1 min read
