Bear Grylls. The Island. Seen it? A bunch of ordinary people dropped onto a desert island with nothing but a day of water and a few machetes. Task 1: Start a fire. Without fire, they can't boil the water they find. So, they'll soon die of thirst. How to start a fire? No matches, nothing.
AI is going to change our lives – it’s going to remove so much of the mundane analysis. What’s more, it’s going to be able to predict things that previously we’d have had to figure out for ourselves. Wonderful stuff, machine learning. But don’t be fooled. There is one question AI will never answer. It
I am generally loath to dumb down anything into oversimplified bullet points, but I am going to make an exception today because I think this matter is so important but so ignored - it needs a little bit of extra focus! Most shopper insights are driven by suppliers seeking to "influence" retailers. We all know
It’s a fascinating and familiar conundrum. Despite there being literally thousands of products in a supermarket that we never buy and are never likely to buy, we somehow manage to get in and out, buy our regular shopping, and complete the task in a relatively short time. Undistracted by everything we don’t need. I know
The world is full of AI conferences, AI suppliers, AI blogs, books, consultants. AI everywhere. Makes me feel we are missing out. That our business may be falling behind, maybe even facing extinction, our business is about making sense of data and getting answers to help better business decisions. At face value, we should be
I used to feel that at worst, being a professional marketer meant helping my employer or client succeed and thus provide jobs, and products people enjoyed. At best, I was ensuring the onward progress of our society for the good of all (more wealth = better lives across the planet). In fact, data globally shows
Remember Step 2 of the Eight Step Process anyone? Define the Role of the Category. Well, how did that work out for you? It was an important consideration. Pointless to propose strategies that were a mismatch for what a retailer sought to achieve “top-down” with that category. In a limited space environment, tough choices need
Back in the day, most larger CPG firms had massive human resources, and budgets for data to match. There was the capability to strive for the optimum within insights and data solutions. Things have changed. CPG is under pressure as never before, as growth slows and retail competition heats up. Companies react by slimming down
Data is the currency of modern business. Getting the right conclusions and taking action driven by data is critical to personal and collective success. But I reckon the canary has just keeled over in the coal mine. I have probably sat through or presented at over hundreds, maybe even a thousand data presentations in my
We talk to CPG companies about shopper insights day in day out. We are used to rooms filled with “category” people, and indeed salespeople. But it's amazing how rarely brand managers come along. I think the shorthand or even subliminal implication to marketing departments is that talking shopper is about retailers, selling, more about execution,
