Plenty of luxury brands talk about protecting their identity. Few can describe the mechanism that does it. At Shoptalk Europe 2026 in Barcelona, Alexi...
View articleLaunching genuinely new technology into a category defined by simplicity is one of the harder marketing problems in retail. The product cannot be expl...
View articleThe Christmas window is the most competitive activation period in UK retail. Brands compete for Oxford Street, luxury retailers want spectacle, and ag...
View articleThere is a version of community marketing that exists almost entirely in brand decks: the language of connection, belonging, and purpose that sounds m...
View articlePop-ups have become so common they have almost stopped meaning anything. Every mall has them, every brand has done one, every activation deck includes...
View articleThere is a version of brand storytelling that fills conference sessions and does very little: narrative frameworks, brand purpose pyramids, customer j...
View articleThe rules of retail discoverability are being rewritten. Not gradually, not eventually: the shift is already underway, and the retailers who are still...
View articleThree days at Fira Gran Via last week made one shift impossible to ignore: the moment of discovery has moved off the retailer’s own shelf and in...
View articleMost transformation stories arrive pre-edited. By the time a CEO takes a stage to describe a successful turnaround, the difficult decisions have been ...
View articleThere are brands that lose their way gradually, through a series of small decisions that each seem reasonable at the time, until the cumulative effect...
View articleThere is a version of the Arc’teryx story that is easy to tell and mostly wrong. The version where a technical outdoor brand got lucky with cele...
View articlePentland Brands Stopped Photo Shoots. AI Made It Possible. There is a gap between what brands know AI can do and what they have actually committed to....
View articlePlatform businesses do not happen by accident. They happen when a company decides, at a point of genuine choice, to stop competing on what it sells an...
View articleThe hardest thing in prestige beauty is not building a brand. It is keeping one relevant when the moment consumers are looking for you lasts about as ...
View articleAccording to AlixPartners’ Consumer Sentiment Index, a survey of 9,000 US consumers, service as a shopping priority increased 34% year over year...
View articleFragrance does not do before and after. It cannot show a transformation, fix a problem, or explain itself in the language of performance beauty. For m...
View articleMost beauty brands treat professionals as a distribution channel. They court them at trade shows, offer wholesale pricing, and hope the endorsement fo...
View articleThe fashion industry has spent decades operating on a basic information gap. A brand sells a dress to a department store buyer. The buyer places it on...
View articleLauren Sherman had been CMO of Ruggable for a matter of weeks when she made the call. The brand was over-indexed in channels with diminishing returns,...
View articleWhen Saatva CEO Ron Rudzin watched coverage of the Paris Olympics, he read that athletes were unhappy with their sleeping arrangements in the village....
View articleThe budget line tells you everything. Right now, across most DTC and omnichannel brands, CTV spending sits inside the brand budget. The measurement mo...
View articleWhen generative AI made content production essentially free, it also made brand indistinction nearly universal. The result, now visible across virtual...
View articleMost founder stories from 2008 begin with a pitch deck. Brent Ridge, MD begins with a layoff and a goat. He was thirty years old, working as Director ...
View articleKnow Your Customer Before You Know Your Channel Multiple sessions on day 2 came back to the same starting point: you cannot build community, pick the ...
View articleAI came up in almost every room today. It was not the real subject. The real subject was identity: whether a brand knows what it stands for clearly en...
View articleThe brands on stage at Pulse eCommerce Summit 2026 are performing. What was striking, across two days in London, was how consistently the explanations...
View article“Advertising is no longer a broadcast sent into the world and measured weeks later. Through agentic AI and connected data layers, it becomes a l...
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