A smarter zookeeper is still a zookeeper: breaking free from the “say–do” gap
Picture the lion enclosure again. In Stop studying consumers in a zoo, it’s time to go on safari, we argued that consumer insights has spent decades studying people the way a zoo studies lions: recruited into a controlled setting, watched through glass, asked to...
When teens come off social, what happens to your brand data?
Under-16 social media restrictions are removing millions of accounts from major platforms. Australia alone has deactivated, removed or restricted more than 4.7 million under-16 accounts, and Indonesia has reported 4.1 million TikTok and 600,000 YouTube removals. The...
Meet the Ankle Biters: the shampoo brands quietly winning on reviews
We picked ten US shampoo brands that grew their consumer review ratings this year, most of them without the media weight of a household name behind them. This is not a top ten. It is ten brands that met a set of criteria we set in advance, and one of them turned out...
20 questions to ask before building your own consumer insights AI
At some point in nearly every enterprise sales conversation we have, someone asks the question: “Couldn’t we just build this ourselves?” It’s a fair question. The raw ingredients seem accessible: social listening APIs, review scrapers and services, a frontier LLM, and...
