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...
2 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...
3 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...
4 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...
5 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...
6 days ago • 1 min read
New research found that more immersive tech doesn’t always mean more buyers. Every few months, another company announces a bold new virtual reality shopping experience. The assumption is easy enough to understand. If customers become more immersed, they’ll become more convinced. Right? New research says it isn’t that simple. The researchers found that immersive VR often outperformed desktop-based VR, but only under specific conditions. When customers could already rotate, inspect, and...
7 days ago • 1 min read
The most revealing response to a rebrand isn’t outrage. It’s indifference. There was a time when Instagram changing its logo was front-page marketing news. People went on about it for weeks. Designers dissected every pixel. Users declared the app ruined before quickly forgetting what the old logo even looked like. But this time around… barely a ripple. Instagram has introduced its first wordmark redesign in a decade. The app icon remains the same, but the lettering has been subtly modernized....
8 days ago • 2 min read
One wee packaging change might sell more peanut butter than a new logo ever could. Jif has unveiled its first major packaging redesign in more than 30 years. Some people will notice the cleaner logo, bolder colours and even the larger variety names. I see something else. Down in the bottom corner of the label, some new stuff has slid in. Image: Jif The creamy variety now shows an apple slice with a dollop of peanut butter. Other varieties feature celery or a graham cracker. Beside these are...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Lots of companies try to use anchoring. Very few execute it to perfection. In 1974, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published one of the most famous studies ever in behavioral economics. Participants watched a wheel spin to a random number, either 10 or 65, then estimated the percentage of African nations that were in the UN. The random number they saw HEAVILY influenced their answers. People exposed to the number 10 guessed an average of 25%. The ones exposed to a 65 guessed...
10 days ago • 2 min read
