Beyond the Plate: How GLP-1s Are Reshaping Beauty, Fitness, Travel and the Wardrobe
The most important GLP-1 story may not be what people stop eating. It may be what happens after the body changes.
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A decade of analysis on the shifts changing consumers, categories and competition—kept intact, made searchable, and ready to use.
183 articles
Make Them Work For It
Think about something you worked hard to make. A meal.
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The Parasocial Dividend: Creators as Makers or Breakers of Joy
The people inside a product can create extraordinary joy and loyalty. They can also break something no corporate statement can fully repair.
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The Standard Was Not Set in Your Category
Customers do not maintain separate expectations for every industry. The company resetting their standards may never appear in your competitive set.
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Don't Cry for Me, Argentina
We Design Beginnings. Nobody Designs the End.
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Load-Bearing Friction: What Are We Really Saving Time For?
Last week I took a taxi, and the driver — an older man — started talking to me about joy. “I used to love going to the bank,” he said.
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A Non-Working Cat
This week I don't want to talk about the science of joy, or even about branding. I want to talk about the joy of feeling seen.
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Community Is Worth the Friction. The Watch Party Proves It.
The couch in New Jersey had the better view. Higher definition, no transfers, no fare, a clean replay of every call.
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How I Met Your (Scrub) Daddy
I knew something was up when my son, of all people, recommended a dish sponge to me. He was maybe thirteen at the time and had never once volunteered an opinion about cleaning supplies.
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Sephora's Online Store Is Calm. That's the Problem.
Most brands measure what their customers did. Repeat purchase, basket size, conversion, NPS.
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Optimizing for Joy
The over-optimization backlash is not a retreat from progress. It is a shift toward designing brands, products and experiences around the emotional outcomes that compound.
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You're Gonna Lose That Girl
Marketers know retention beats acquisition. They just keep dating new people.
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Power to the People: A Three-Year Postscript
Three years ago I argued in a Cambridge handbook that brand-side NFTs would fail. They did.
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The Brand That Beat Amazon by Handing Customers the Calculator
Best Buy’s turnaround shows why brands should remove the customer’s core anxiety before investing in delight: calm first, joy second.
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Joyforaging Is the New Doomscrolling
Somewhere in the last two years, a quiet swap happened. The same person who used to open Twitter in line at the coffee shop is now opening NYT's Connections.
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Maxxing. For Grandma
Gen Z just invented a new word for living like your grandmother. They're calling it nonnamaxxing — nonna, the Italian word for grandma, plus the "-maxxing" suffix born in the darkest corners of internet hustle culture.
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Sparking Joy in Retail: What the Best New Stores Know That Most Don't
You can buy anything on your phone. Literally anything.
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The Most Valuable Real Estate in Business Is the Space You Only See After the Purchase
My sister called me after reading the Joy Dividend book, to discuss ice cream of all things. Specifically, the funny little messages her favorite brand hides inside the wrapper — the ones you only see after you've already bought the product, already opened it,
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