San Jose went and turned a familiar NHL nickname into a spectacle that makes the game-day experience unmistakably its own. My Edmonton Oilers visit San Jose this afternoon, and will have their hands full with or without Sharks superstar Macklin Celebrini on hand. But imagine looking down at your skates and seeing a few great whites circling UNDER the ice. The Sharks have recently added a creepy underwater illusion to their pregame show at SAP Center: Animated sharks swim through rippling...
1 day ago • 1 min read
Jaguar’s inherited fame gives its reinvention a huge audience, but customers will decide if its EV deserves a future. The internet rallied to defend the old Jaguar with an enthusiasm its showrooms sure coulda used. Annual sales had continuously fallen by roughly two-thirds between 2018 and 2023, before the infamous rebrand. Keeping everybody happy with the OLD Jaguar would have been plain stupid. And now the Type 01 has arrived: an electric grand tourer starting at £130,000, with orders...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Snuggle’s Peanuts partnership connects its product to a meaning customers learned long before they bought fabric softener. I wonder what Charles Schulz would make of “peak Peanuts” in 2026, with his characters turning up on everything from Starbucks merchandise to cake mixes. When I was little, my older sister had a security blanket she called her “Linus.” That ragged, love-worn thing probably could have used a hit of Snuggle. Back in the day, the comic strips featuring characters like...
3 days ago • 1 min read
Chipotle gives its freshness message a soundtrack made from the food itself, played by classically trained musicians. As I write this, one of my kids is practising flute after the other’s piano session. I enjoy living in a house of musicians, although I’m firmly on the audience end of that arrangement. So Chipotle had my attention when it sent vegetables to Abbey Road. For reals. The chain teamed up with the London Vegetable Orchestra to record “From Ground to Sound,” using instruments made...
4 days ago • 1 min read
When customers recognize your product’s taste as your brand, you have something you can carry into new formats and occasions. For most of my life, Reese’s was peanut butter cups and the Pieces Elliott shared with E.T. “Two great tastes that taste great together,” as the old ads put it after chocolate collided with peanut butter in the happiest of accidents. Over time, that combination became a single taste we recognize as Reese’s. (Although the chocolate seems to be eroding into...
5 days ago • 1 min read
More than 40 years ago, Jobs described how computers would preserve a person’s worldview, answer questions and act as personal agents. Steve Jobs gets credited with predicting a ton of stuff after the fact. But this one’s especially hard to dismiss. At the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Jobs talked about the limitations of books. He loved how they let you access Aristotle or Plato directly, without an intermediary. But books disappointed him in one big way. You couldn’t ask...
6 days ago • 2 min read
I tend to write subject lines as statements. Research suggests I could be leaving readership on the table. I have this habit with subject lines… Even when they begin with words like How or Why, I tend to frame them as statements rather than questions. Why Customers Choose the Familiar instead of Why Do Customers Choose the Familiar? The first one has always seemed cleaner to me. More confident, I guess. Less clickbait-y. A study I came across has me reconsidering that instinct. Researchers at...
7 days ago • 2 min read
New research suggests the best way to use generative AI for product ideation is to add on MORE constraints. When innovators use AI to develop a new product idea (or any creative idea), there’s an obvious temptation: Show me what it looks like. That can be useful early on. But new research suggests it can also be a trap. A 2026 study in Information Systems Research examines how people refine ideas with AI-generated text versus AI-generated visuals. The researchers found that textual...
8 days ago • 2 min read
New research links getting a smartphone before 13 with dramatically worse mental health in young adulthood… and the younger the child, the worse the association is. My daughters were the last kids in their classes and social groups to get smartphones. Like, VERY last. At one point another parent asked us if we weren’t worried they might get teased. Of course they got some ribbing. (About that AND the fact that they’ve never, ever eaten at McDonald’s.) And for sure there were plenty of moments...
9 days ago • 3 min read
