Stated intent is emotional. Commitment is situational. Multiple consumer studies in 2025 showed the same weird gap: People would talk about cutting back, spending less, being practical. Then they bought other stuff anyway, as long as value and necessity show up clearly in the moment. I don’t really think buyers are lying on purpose. Most genuinely believe what they say when asked about spending intentions. It just isn’t what they often go on to do. This is often the case in surveys, where...
2 days ago • 1 min read
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. Then McDonald’s trots out something bizarre: McNuggets paired with real Baerii sturgeon caviar, curated with Paramount Caviar. And they GIVE it away. Clearly, this play is not about upgrading nuggets in an over-the-top way. But what, then? It is a fun, fresh...
3 days ago • 1 min read
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 fix it. And move on. But a new series of experiments suggests returns are capable of far more psychological work than most brands realize. Researchers found that when brands issued refunds without asking for the product back, customer sentiment improved across the board. Brand opinions rose by 19.3. Reviews improved by 30.1%....
4 days ago • 1 min read
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 untangle themselves. (And some days there’s a LOT of entanglement.) I have long suspected there is something mechanical going on. Motion seems to free cognition. Which is why I have always wondered about chewing gum. The word ruminate literally means to chew. And there’s something to it, proven by science. A peer-reviewed study...
5 days ago • 1 min read
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 behind rising prices, and often found them in origin labels. “Made in USA” claims surged across e-commerce listings, not as patriotism theater, but as a way to navigate value trade-offs. If the price is higher, buyers want to know why … and whether that increase is stable or risky. Last year we...
7 days ago • 1 min read
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 pretty brittle. That is why Robotiq adding tactile sensor fingertips to its 2F-85 Adaptive Gripper matters more than it sounds. Vision tells a robot where something is. Touch tells what it’s like, and what’s going on with it. Slip, force distribution, and contact geometry … these are not...
7 days ago • 1 min read
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 smart people still don’t know what the heck it is, or why they ought to care. Agentic commerce means software agents that don’t stop at recommending products, but can actually buy them. They compare options, place orders, and complete transactions on your behalf, across retailers, without you clicking “add to cart.” That...
9 days ago • 1 min read
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 self-checkout. Removing ALL such lanes in some cases, and reducing them in others. The headlines frame this as friction versus efficiency. I don’t believe that’s the real story. I appreciate a speedy, knowledgeable, well-trained cashier. I dislike standing frozen at a self-checkout waiting for...
10 days ago • 1 min read
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, and margin erosion that never shows up in the ad dashboard. And yet platforms like Shopify and Amazon promote easy returns as if we seriously want everyone to use them. Retail returns in the U.S. will surpass $850,000,000,000 in 2026. (I wrote the number out because “$850 billion” doesn’t do it justice!)...
10 days ago • 1 min read
