New research shows buying decisions change when people recognize a gap in their understanding. A fresh new study explores what happens when people look into one ethical aspect of a product they already intend to buy. After a short period of searching, those buyers’ priorities shifted in a measurable way. All of a sudden, ethical considerations carried more weight than before. And the change begins at a specific point: when we notice that our understanding is incomplete. We then start to work...
1 day ago • 1 min read
When value happens can matter more than the value itself. A study on temporal framing looked at a familiar problem. Most folks say they care about the environment. Yet we don’t consistently buy products that support it. The gap isn’t so much price, or beliefs. It’s mostly about time. When benefits are framed as happening “fairly soon,” some buyers disengage. When the same benefits are framed further into the future, those same buyers become more positive, more interested, AND more likely to...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Reputation seldom moves markets the way you’d expect. The Ford Pinto is one of those products you name and it instantly triggers a reaction in people of a certain age. Rear-end collision. Kaboom. The association is instantaneous. And yet, for years, those cars were like, EVERYWHERE. I rode thousands of miles with a friend in one. My neighbour’s teenage son had one too. They were common in driveways and school parking lots across North America. In its first two years, over 800,000 Pintos were...
3 days ago • 1 min read
Shake it off: not even Taylor Swift and Kylie Jenner own their Instagram followers. A few days ago, Instagram carried out what some are calling the “Great Purge of 2026.” According to reporting from Meta watchers and cybersecurity outlets, millions of fake, inactive, and non-organic accounts vaporized from the platform. The fallout was instantaneous. Kylie Jenner reportedly lost more than 15 million followers. Cristiano Ronaldo lost nearly 7 million. Taylor Swift lost around 5 million. Even...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Patents can protect an invention, but they rarely protect a category once it proves valuable. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he made a point of saying they had “patented the heck out of it.” They had. Multi-touch gestures, interface behaviors, hardware details, all heavily protected by Apple. Over 200 patents filed on that original model alone. Within a few years, the market filled with devices that looked and behaved in strikingly similar ways. Jobs later described it as...
5 days ago • 1 min read
The most effective product signals lately are the ones nobody paid to create. “The Devil Wears Prada” gave luxury fashion a cultural shortcut. You didn’t need to explain what Prada meant after that title entered our culture. Now the internet has accidentally created another one. A few days ago, a Vatican documentary trailer featuring Pope Leo XIV went viral after viewers noticed something unexpected beneath the papal robes: crisp white Nike sneakers with a black Swoosh. Sneaker forums quickly...
6 days ago • 1 min read
The most powerful product moments happen when a brand shows up in something we really care about. During a lunar flyby for Artemis II, a jar of Nutella floated by, through the cabin on a live broadcast. No setup or announcement. Just a beloved chocolatey product drifting in zero gravity with the label visible for a few seconds. That was the moment. Clips spread quickly, and what could have been a throwaway moment turned into something way bigger. It felt almost as cinematic as “Project Hail...
7 days ago • 1 min read
When timing matters, the best solution lets you experience it. Barilla partnered with Spotify to create playlists that match the cooking time of different pasta shapes. You boil the water, plip-plop-plunk in the pasta, press play, and when the playlist ends, your pasta is ready. It’s a fairly small idea, but it solves a common tension would-be pasta chefs struggle with. Especially a new generation of them with no prior experience (except maybe KD). Cooking pasta isn’t super difficult, but...
8 days ago • 1 min read
I love it when a gimmicky invention gets legs that just won’t quit. The BIC 4 Colours pen arrived in 1970, created by Marcel Bich at BIC, and on the surface it looked like a simple consolidation of four pens into one. That’s sure not how it felt. As a kid, I remember thinking this thing was pretty magical, and when I finally got my own, I probably spent more time clicking between the colours than actually writing. There was something deeply satisfying about the mechanism, the smart way that...
9 days ago • 1 min read
