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 you put AI on top of a bad process, you just get to a bad place faster and cheaper.” That is the message most product teams seem to nod and forget. Coca-Cola is seeing real gains from AI. Faster, cheaper marketing assets. (Like that Christmas commercial we all saw.) More customization. Smarter suggested orders...
2 days ago • 1 min read
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 once a luxury … not all that long ago. My grandparents’ farm still had an outhouse and a hand-pump well when I was a kid. And they felt perfectly satisfied. Air-conditioning used to be something you bragged about until the 1990s. Today even the cheapest cars include it because if you live somewhere hot, you need that. But...
3 days ago • 1 min read
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 say cooking is the biggest “green flag.” No, not salary.Not hobbies.Cooking! Knorr took that insight and built a social-first campaign around it. And it worked because it sold confidence, connection, and competence (not bouillon cubes). I smiled reading the study because I have my own soft spot for Knorr. Their...
4 days ago • 1 min read
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. Miro the Pomeranian–chihuahua cross my sister adopted when I was a kid. We were told that date was her birthday. No documentation. No provenance. Just the date that was mentioned in passing when we adopted the pup. And yet it welded itself into my memory as if it were a national holiday. (Actually, better. I can...
5 days ago • 1 min read
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 accelerate for years. Emergents and challenger brands are now outselling legacy CPGs in 16 of 18 Amazon categories. In fifteen of those, the lead is more than fifteen percent. Heritage is nobody’s moat on Amazon. Visibility is. Third-party sellers are beating major brands because they understand the modern...
6 days ago • 1 min read
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 happens in our minds. We pause in thinking so much about what we have and start thinking about who we want to be. In I Need That, I call this the Coveted Condition: the customer’s desired future state. Not “a faster blender” but “New Me eats better.” Not “a new tool” but “New Me finally gets projects done.” Not “a smarter...
7 days ago • 1 min read
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 longer accept. Every buyer enters the new year with a quiet list in his or her head. Not of what they want or need, but of what they would replace first if a better option appeared. And THAT list is the truest map of market opportunity you’ll ever get … yet it rarely matches the categories founders expect. The products that...
8 days ago • 1 min read
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 of builder. And yet every question he asked pushed the messaging toward more complexity. More angles. More layers. More value props stacked like geological strata. Wherever we achieved clarity, his impulses pulled us back into ever-deeper fog. It was a perfect live demonstration of how products bloat. Not...
9 days ago • 1 min read
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 and ratings are strong, purchase intent jumps. Dramatically. Especially for products with moderate involvement, which covers most consumer goods. This is the bandwagon heuristic at work. When uncertainty exists, shoppers ask a simple question: What are OTHER people doing? A long line of reviews signals safety. It reduces...
10 days ago • 1 min read
