Shopify merchants can now set up ChatGPT ads in the platform, but the real story is how AI is changing product discovery. Shoppers increasingly ask ChatGPT questions like: What’s the best carry-on for a two-week trip?Which office chair works well for someone 6’2″?What should I buy my kid who loves drawing? Now merchants can pay to show up inside that decision process, and do it in an easy way. This week OpenAI launched ChatGPT Ads for Shopify, cementing its first ecommerce partnership for the...
1 day ago • 2 min read
New neuroscience proves the clearer your position, the easier the decision. Here’s an experiment I love. Researchers recently showed people circles filled with hundreds of parallel lines. Each participant had to learn an invisible rule: Lines tilted one side of a particular angle belonged in Category A, while lines tilted the other way belonged in Category B. The dividing angle could be something totally random, like 73 degrees. Nobody was told what it was. Through trial and error, most...
2 days ago • 2 min read
Starbucks offers a useful warning about the difference between understanding how businesses work and knowing how to make one work. During Laxman Narasimhan’s 17 months running Starbucks, the company lost about $32 billion in market value. Its share price fell almost 24%. Then Starbucks canned him. There’s an interesting backstory. Narasimhan spent 19 years at McKinsey, eventually becoming a director. He later held senior roles at PepsiCo and became CEO of Reckitt before Starbucks recruited...
3 days ago • 2 min read
It takes a ton of work to make a brand extension like this seem like it belongs. But it does for a reason. Maybe I live under a rock, but until shortly before I wrote about the Lamborghini stroller, I had no idea there even was such a thing. Then I discovered there are Lamborghini phones too. Of course there are. The newest one is the TECNO POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition, launched this month. It has a 6.78-inch AMOLED display, a 6500mAh battery, a MediaTek Dimensity 7400...
4 days ago • 2 min read
One of IKEA’s weirdest brand quirks has become a game, and a pretty good lesson in how to turn confusion into engagement. I’ve joked before about IKEA’s remarkable ability to give products names that are almost universally unpronounceable outside Scandinavia. Some are super easy. BILLY. LACK. Although I still wonder who but IKEA would ever look at a product and decide, “LACK… perfect!” Then there are beauties like DJUNGELSKOG, BREVBÄRARE and SKÄMTSKÅL. You can teach me those today and I...
5 days ago • 2 min read
The Sienna’s built-in FridgeBox is a cool feature. Toyota’s new ice cream collaboration makes you immediately know why you need one. A freezer in a minivan is pretty cool. Literally, and metaphorically. The 2026 Toyota Sienna Platinum has an integrated FridgeBox in the front console. It has both a cooling mode AND a freeze mode, so it can keep drinks cold and frozen treats frozen while you’re on the road. Toyota says the feature is standard on the Platinum and available on the Limited. I like...
6 days ago • 2 min read
One bite-sized decision made Apple’s logo unmistakable. And decades of brand building packed it with meaning. During a branding discussion a few days ago, I recalled a story about the Apple logo that sounded almost too tidy to be true. Turns out, I remembered it correctly. Apple’s original logo, designed in 1976 by co-founder Ronald Wayne, was an elaborate illustration of Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree, surrounded by text. It looked more like the frontispiece of an old book than...
7 days ago • 2 min read
Nearly a century after turning the sound of Rice Krispies into a brand asset, Kellogg’s commissioned a cereal bowl designed to amp it up. This is so gloriously unnecessary. Kellogg’s commissioned British designer Dominic Wilcox to create a Snap, Crackle and Pop amplification cereal bowl. It looks a little like a gramophone attached to your breakfast. Pour in Rice Krispies and milk, switch it on, and a microphone picks up the familiar crackling from the cereal. A speaker inside the large red...
8 days ago • 2 min read
New research shows that uncertainty makes a reward more desirable. Imagine two people each receive a $20 gift card. One is simply handed the card. The other spins a prize wheel offering $10, $20 or $30, and happens to stop on $20. Both got the same card, and the exact same value. But the second person likes theirs MORE. That’s the cool finding from new research involving seven preregistered experiments and more than 12,000 participants. The researchers call it the “uncertainty spillover...
9 days ago • 1 min read
