A-aye or A-nay? Erm, oh dear. Turns out that if you describe your product as using AI, it lowers a customer’s intention to buy it. The Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of hospitality business management at Washington State University (yes, that really is their title) said: ‘In every single case, the intention to buy or use …

Grab some popcorn… A lil’ while back we shared Mark Ritson’s article on Liquid Death neglecting product.  But now Will Poskett has entered the chat. And he thinks Ritson is wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong some more: “In short, product differentiation and innovation are very limited in the commoditized bottled water category. Yet despite these …

File under: Must listen to I love Sam Conniff’s work on the Uncertainty Experts. And his talk with Neil Perkin on becoming comfortable with uncertainty is quite possibly my favourite thing since the recall email function. A few (ok, lots of…) highlights: Untangling the facts  Using the example of 2 news articles about the same …

Much ado about consumer groups The learnings from our ‘You are not your consumer’ event last month continue – this time we focus on consumer groups. Good, bad, indifferent? See what our speakers had to say. What can we help you with today? In the US, consumer experience is getting worse (again). And it has …

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 …

Look away, Peter Pan Here’s a chin stroker for you: Legal definitions aside, how do you know when you’re an adult? Megan Wright and Sophie von Stumm have surveyed 722 people to find out: “The research suggests that many people define adulthood more by psychological markers than by social milestones – in other words, adulthood …