London calling – are you listening? More from the excellent event we had in May, this time featuring some of the things we took away on listening. Lots of people in the room that day have since told me how much they loved this from Avi Kluger: “The quality of the listener dictates the quality …

What happens in London… We had a grand old time with 260 of you at our ‘You are not your consumer event’ a few weeks back. I promised some sneak peaks of the talks in The100, so let’s start with getting stakeholder buy-in on understanding people. “Fixing culture starts with calendars” Meetings, bloody meetings. Bruce …

Should we bin empathy?  By the time you read this, I’ll hopefully be on a beach just outside of Barcelona, taking a breather after our ‘You Are Not Your Consumer’ event in London yesterday. I always love organising our conferences, but I also really enjoy it when they’re over 😂  I’ll share clips from the …

Still looking for your AI use-case? Ben Evans has been looking at how he’s been using the models that are out there, and he’s yet to find out where it all fits in for him. “It’s very cool, but how much do we use it, and what for?” He says that adoption is matching a …

“A regular sequence of work and thought” 50 years ago, Stephen King of JWT published his planning guide. And the planning cycle from page 18 onwards is still a bombproof way to think about structuring any strategy. In the “Where could we be” section on page 27, King highlights the role of qual:  “It is …

We’re going on a trend hunt The US Food & Wellness report 2024 is out. And, despite there being a lot of claimed behaviour in there (see rubber O-rings / partial data section below), it’s an interesting read. My highlights: What you can learn from rubber O-rings Aside from sending people to the moon, NASA …

Invisible ignorance  David Dunning (yes, the Dunning in the Dunning-Kruger effect) was interviewed about ‘self insight’. It’s a fascinating discussion.  “In terms of our character, we overplay how much agency we have over the world. We’re not as influential as we think.  And in terms of confidence, we overestimate how much we know…. each of …

This is what you will believe today  Monmouth Poll posted some clickbait research showing that 1 in 5 Americans believe that Taylor Swift is part of a covert government effort to re-elect Biden.  But (and it’s a pretty big one) 42% of those who reported believing this, hadn’t heard about that conspiracy prior to being …

Fancy a day out of the office? Roll up, roll up! Tickets for our in person event, You Are Not Your Consumer, are now live. The theme of the day is how to better understand people not like you.  We have 10 superb speakers lined up, including regular cast member of The100, Rory Sutherland (somebody …

“Welcome to AirSpace” We (or maybe just me?) may moan at what the algorithm churns out in our “because you did this, you might be interested in that” sections. However, more dangerously, algorithms are flattening our culture. Kyle Chayka has written a book on it and, using cafes as an example, has summarised her thoughts: …