When quality perception has a hiccup, that’s a tasty opportunity for the competition. There’s a mini-revolt afoot in the candy aisle. Fans of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, including a grandson of the original inventor, have publicly criticized newer iterations of the dominant brand, pointing to a drier, chalkier filling. Whether that critique is universal (or even accurate) is beside the point. What matters is that enough consumers believe it. For whatever reason, there’s been no shortage of...
3 days ago • 1 min read
The most serious product decision can be where your learning happens. Swiss watch exports are softening, and the headlines are full of depressing “downturn” stories. Yet Audemars Piguet, Rolex, Hermès, and others are still expanding factories and pulling more of the work in-house. Wait, what? It looks totally irrational if you think manufacturing is purely a cost center. It makes perfect sense if you think manufacturing is your ability to compound and tightly control. A factory isn’t mere...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Gen Z’s return to old devices signals a desire for involvement and a sense of control. A Toronto Star story, echoing another by Sherwood News, reports something that would have sounded pretty improbable a few years ago. Gen Z is buying iPods again. Not for irony or as hilarious costume props, but as everyday music players. At the same time, vinyl continues to move serious volume for younger buyers who aren’t necessarily audiophiles. My daughters recently pointed out a huge display of Taylor...
5 days ago • 2 min read
Truth, used properly, compounds. My 11-year-old heard a slogan on TV the other day and immediately objected. “What a terrible tagline.” She was talking about Buckley’s Mixture and its long-running line: “It tastes awful. And it works.” The campaign dates back to the 1980s in Canada and hasn’t wavered since. From an eleven-year-old’s perspective, my daughter is right. Why would anyone advertise that their product tastes disgusting? Because the ad is not for her. When I was a kid, my mother...
6 days ago • 1 min read
IKEA’s viral baby monkey moment is a gift. And playing it well was a delicate art. You’ve likely heard about this or seen the images: a baby macaque named Punch at Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan was rejected by his mother and struggled to bond with his troop. Zookeepers gave the little guy several comfort items. He chose one: IKEA’s Djungelskog plush orangutan. Photos of the lonely monkey hugging the stuffy immediately went viral. What followed was definitely not a campaign in the traditional...
7 days ago • 1 min read
The big shift here isn’t price or e-commerce capability. It’s buyer psychology. The average home in the U.S. now costs north of half a million bucks. On Amazon, I just added one to my cart for under ten grand. This ain’t no dollhouse, people. It’s a steel-framed prefab tiny house with fold-out double-wing walls, pre-installed plumbing and electrical, a bathroom, kitchen, insulation, and layout customization up to 40 feet. And yep, I clicked “Add to Cart,” just to say I did. (Maybe don’t tell...
8 days ago • 1 min read
When stories reboot, products resonate again too. My kids are huge Harry Potter fans. We have watched every film together. They have read every book. My youngest finished the entire million-plus-word series by age seven. When we visit Universal Studios or the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, the parts tied to that world are still the emotional center. And naturally, we have a few of those official wands kicking around. (Every member of the cast has their own unique style, you know.) Now Hasbro has...
9 days ago • 1 min read
What brand name to use depends what you’re asking the name to carry. Reader Josie from San Diego wrote after my note on misspellings and asked a fair question. “With great .com domains being scarce and trademark clearance harder than ever, how do you know when a playful spelling will work, and when it will likely underperform?” First, context matters. Krispy Kreme and Kool-Aid were never trying to establish medical credibility or technical authority. They were offering up indulgence, color …...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Robot vacuums have climbed to a new level. Literally. What happens when a category clears a major hurdle? I wrote a while back that robot vacuums don’t work in my house. They’re just not feasible, with too many stairs. Four different levels. Split landings and thresholds. The robot we tried noisily cleaned one floor and ignored the rest of the architecture by default. That limitation has been structural and fixed since the very first version. But at CES 2026, Roborock showed the Saros Rover,...
11 days ago • 1 min read
