Starbucks joins a growing list of brands deliberately making creative effort front-and-centre. Seems I’ve stumbled into an accidental series. Apple Music vibrated mineral oil with sound to create its new identity. Levi’s and E.L.F. built painstaking stop-motion holiday campaigns. And then Prada went and hired veteran Disney animator John Pomeroy and a team of traditional artists to draw its new holiday world by hand. Now Starbucks is servin’ up its own version. For Perfect Harmony, artist...
1 day ago • 1 min read
Customers have been trained to see shipping as free. But someone still has to pay for the box, labour, truck and fuel, never mind the inevitable return trips. Amazon has done a plain remarkable job convincing us that products magically appear at our doors for FREE. To the point that we get irked if we ever have to pay to ship something we buy… or return. In Ryder’s 2026 ecommerce study, 62% of shoppers said free shipping influences purchase decisions, and 71% had abandoned carts because of...
2 days ago • 1 min read
An influencer can create appetite even while the path to your product is a mystery. An influencer tears into a magnificent sandwich, and suddenly your lunch plans change. You dab away the drool, open the caption to find the restaurant, scroll through the comments for an address… but no joy. By then, the leftovers in your fridge are looking pretty convenient. A new study in Digital Business surveys 449 social media users about food influencers. Platform user-friendliness had the largest direct...
3 days ago • 1 min read
AI is making polished imagery easier than ever. Levi’s and E.L.F. are betting folks will notice when humans do the hard part instead. As a kid, I was fascinated by stop-motion animation. Something like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer seemed insane once you grasped how it was made. The 1964 special used handmade four-inch puppets across 22 miniature sets, with 24 painstaking frames required for every second of animation. That’s like, 1,440 individual photos for every single minute. Now Levi’s...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Columbia’s canned puffers show how an unexpected setting can make a familiar product look considerably more necessary. Columbia has put puffer jackets in cans, which is one way to make a winter coat look like something you might need urgently. They’re stocked inside its “Don’t Panic Room,” a 40-foot converted shipping container the company is giving away. It comes with a kitchen, bathroom and bunk bed, plus a robotic dog called Rocky. (Presumably, Rocky won’t scarf down all your emergency...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Good or bad, every customer pic containing your product is adding something to your brand. Brands put huge effort into controlling visual identity. Then customers take over. They photograph your product in kitchens, garages, campsites, offices, gym bags and airplane seats. Those pics accumulate online, gradually attaching meanings to the brand that no guidelines document ever specified. A new study in the International Journal of Research in Marketing shows how much easier AI is making that...
6 days ago • 1 min read
There’s a selfish little consumer behaviour researchers have finally given a name to. Tell me if you’ve experienced something like this. Near where I live, there’s a new Mexican restaurant with fantastic food and almost absurdly good value. I occasionally write restaurant reviews, so normally I’d be happy to tell people about it. Except I caught myself thinking: maybe I shouldn’t. What if it gets crowded, and then the prices shoot up? What if my family can’t waltz in and get a table anymore?...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Somewhere along the way, a little Belgian coffee biscuit became an ingredient to put into anything. What is up with Biscoff? I like the spicy-sweet biscuits. To me, they scratch pretty much the same itch as Dutch speculaas, my favourite things in the whole mass-produced cookie world. And lately Biscoff seems unavoidable. Spread, ice cream, Milka, Côte d’Or, Toblerone truffles, Ferrero Rocher, McFlurries, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Cinnabon, protein bars… My kids even came home from Halloween...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Holiday shopping is about to provide a pretty good stress test for what happens when AI becomes part of the buying decision. A new Harris Poll commissioned by Forter found that 67% of Americans plan to use AI for holiday shopping this year. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, it’s 83%! Those numbers are eye-catching, although this is vendor-sponsored research, so I wouldn’t carve anything into stone. And how about this: 43% of Americans say an AI recommendation has already led them to discover or...
9 days ago • 1 min read
