Our increasingly connected lives are creating a new category of products designed to help us disconnect. I grew up when a phone was attached to the wall. That was the only kind. If someone called while you were having dinner, you stood at the phone. If the cord was long enough, you might pull it around a corner for some privacy. Then humans spent decades improving the phone. We made it cordless, mobile, connected it to the internet, added cameras, GPS, email, games, social media and pretty...
1 day ago • 2 min read
Tech companies have discovered that cameras on your face become easier to normalize when they look less like surveillance equipment and more like fashion. For years, the biggest problem with smart glasses wasn’t technology, but the person standing across from you wondering whether they were being recorded. Google Glass learned that lesson painfully early. Meta has done much better by hiding its technology inside familiar Ray-Ban frames. Now it’s taking the strategy further. Meta recently...
2 days ago • 2 min read
The Laughing Cow turned its most recognizable product into a vehicle, proving the package is the advertising. I saw this thing and immediately thought of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. Exceptin’ it’s a gigantic wedge of cheese. And yeah, The Laughing Cow is the French brand I remember as La Vache qui rit. It was created in France in 1921, and those little individually wrapped triangular portions arrived a few years later in essentially the form we recognize today. The brand says about 10...
3 days ago • 2 min read
Sometimes a tiny flaw makes a product more desirable than perfection. If you’re a coin collector, you already know this: The coins worth the most are often the ones that left the mint with tiny imperfections. Like a misprint. An off-centre strike. Or a missing detail. The mistake becomes the whole story. Fascinatingly, a marketing study found the same effect with consumer products. People consistently preferred products described as having been created by mistake over otherwise identical...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Apple may be late to foldable phones, but watch its arrival reset what consumers expect to pay for one. Samsung launched its first Galaxy Fold in 2019. Apple sat back and watched. Other manufacturers joined in. Hinges sucked, but improved. Screens became tougher. Devices got thinner. That ugly crease down the middle became… less ugly. And Apple kept on watching. Now, seven years later, we’re apparently weeks away from seeing Apple’s answer. Multiple current reports point to Apple unveiling...
5 days ago • 2 min read
Casio’s new F-B100W shows how innovation can mean adding exactly enough technology, then stopping. The Casio F-91W is one of those rare products that seems almost immune to progress. It debuted in 1989, when I was a teenager and Taylor Swift was a newborn. Thirty-seven years later, Casio STILL makes it. You can buy a new one for about $20, and it does what it always did: tells time, runs a stopwatch, sounds an alarm and lights up when it’s dark. The battery lasts about seven years. Now Casio...
6 days ago • 2 min read
More (and longer) reviews don’t mean better customer insight. The opposite could be true. One of the biggest claims of AI is that it helps people express themselves more clearly. And, hey … new research suggests that’s exactly what’s happening. When ChatGPT became available, people started writing more reviews, longer reviews, and more subjective ones. For one- and two-star reviews, the language also became more emotionally extreme. At first glance, that sounds like awesome news for product...
7 days ago • 1 min read
With fun ideas like the Love Lid, Heinz turns a condiment into something people can talk about, personalize and play with. I seem to write about Heinz a lot, which is weird considering I don’t eat that much ketchup. But the company keeps doing stuff worth thinking about. The latest is the Love Lid, created with Wieden+Kennedy London. It’s an adjustable ketchup bottle cap with three settings: Like, Love and Crazy Love. Image: Kraft Heinz Turn the lid valve and you control how much ketchup...
8 days ago • 2 min read
The highest compliment for a brand is hearing customers repeat its positioning back to you. For 14 years, My wife and I drove a Volvo. One thing kept surprising us. People regularly commented on it. Sometimes it was a friend. Other times, a client. And occasionally it was someone we’d just casually met. The comments varied, but they usually came down to the same thing. “Safe car.” I wrote in I Need That that those conversations taught me something important about branding. Nobody ever...
9 days ago • 1 min read
