Recently I had the pleasure of participating at a WARC webinar on behavioral economics and marketing.  It gave me the opportunity to share some thoughts on how marketers can navigate the differing approaches to brand building these days; brand distinctiveness - with its focus on driving meaningless top of mind awareness, brand experience - which … Continue reading Pick, Choose, Change: Three types of decisions, three types of marketing →

What the business book of the year gets wrong about digital marketing “The Age of Surveillance capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor emerita, is a detailed critique of how we’ve allowed powerful corporations to acquire an increasing knowledge of our every digital move, at a depth and breath that threatens to undermine … Continue reading The Limits of Surveillance Capitalism:  →

  Deliver Satisfaction Not Happiness The world famous, Nobel prize winning, behavioral economist, Daniel Kahneman has spent years reviewing and leading the whole literature on happiness research. Overwhelmingly, it finds that if we really wanted to be happy, we wouldn’t be interested in premium brands at all. All the luxury brands in the world, only … Continue reading The psychology of premium branding →

Myself and Matthew Wilcox are hosting another behavior change workshop on May 22nd in Chicago We’ll discuss how and why people make decisions, and how to use these insights to help you craft advertising and user experiences that move the needle for your brand or the brands you work with. A practical hands on workshop, no prior knowledge … Continue reading Announcing the next behavior change workshop →

  The three flaws that hamper organizations decision making and how to overcome them: None of us would think about launching a new product, a new campaign, or a new brand partnership without exhaustive understanding of the psychology of how consumers make the tiny decisions that can make or break these initiatives. But strategists give … Continue reading And you thought consumers were irrational: The behavioral economics of how organizations make decisions →

I had the pleasure of being invited onto Mark's podcast, and we had a great conversation about a bunch of things, but three in particular: Why I feel so bullish about the future of planning What makes planning and planners work Planning in the USA.   Check out the full podcast here. Originally broadcast April, … Continue reading Talking with Mark Pollard on Sweathead “What makes a good planner?” →

Myself and Azania Andrews, the Vice President of Marketing, for Michelob ULTRA at Anheuser-Busch, recently had an opportunity to share the Michelob Ultra story at the ANA's "Masters of Marketing 2018" conference in Orlando. It’s no secret: American light beer has seen better days, with declines in volume, occasions, and category share. To defy this … Continue reading How a diet beer overtook a premium beer →

I had a chance to be interviewed by Vivian Rosenthal for her Forbes column.  She's the founder of Snaps, a messenger marketing platform, and we talked about on how data is changing  advertising.    Here's the highlights of what we discussed: Vivian Rosenthal: Unlike social media, which is one to many, messaging is one to one marketing at scale. What … Continue reading The future of data in marketing →

Nearly 100 years ago, Claude Hopkins published "Scientific Advertising," an instant classic that still remains one of the bestselling advertising books of all time. Chapter six talks about psychology and starts off unequivocally, "The competent advertising man must understand psychology." Reading this a century later, I was struck by how we are at the end of a … Continue reading Have planners abandoned behavioral economics? →