This lesson from Inside Taco Bell’s Innovation Kitchen: “You can change either the taste or the form… but you can’t change the taste and the form.”
Customers need an anchor point in familiarity.
Vice on the trendy Stanley Tumblers
responsible for a $676 million increase in revenue, from 2019 to 2023, for the brand
dropping exclusives, like their Stanley X Starbucks collab, which led people to literally camp out outside stores.
Their most recent drop – a limited edition Valentine’s Day cup, in a fairly normal pink and a fairly normal red – has people performing citizen’s arrests in Target in an effort to cop.
A dash of (not untrue) snark:
following the rule-book of forced hyper-exclusivity typically only seen in hype bro fashion brands
The power of drops
From Exploding Topics:
Immersive dining is part of the Immersive Experiences meta trend.
Searches for “immersive experiences” have grown by 144% over the past 24 months.
Immersive experiences have become more accessible, thanks to technologies like AR, VR, and projection mapping.
Videos about immersive experiences have over 515 million views on TikTok.
The further we get from pandemic-era lockdowns, the more the consumer pendulum swings from goods to experiences.
When I started doing things just for growth’s sake and didn’t let the product simmer within the industry, I started making a lot of mistakes. With the products, with the customers, with the positioning.
About that Google kicking cookies to the curb thing…
Google is phasing out third-party cookies this fall, but some sites will be able to temporarily re-enable them until the year end.
via MarTech
It’s GA4 all over again
🍪 ☠️
The day has come, with Google activating the first stage of its cookie-removal strategy today [January 4]
via SocialMediaToday
From FedEx to airlines, companies are starting to lose their pricing power
Consumers may be regaining power in the marketplace
It’s a shift from the recent years when consumers spent at a breakneck pace — and at high prices — lifting corporate revenues to new records. But faced with weakening demand, more price-sensitive consumers, easing inflation and better supply, some sectors are now forced to find profit growth without the tailwind of price hikes.
Societal gradient descent toward that long-rumored “new normal”
The current state of shipping & returns:
Returns totaled $743B in 2023; reach 14.5% of sales
Online sales have a higher return rate, with 17.6% or $247 billion of merchandise purchased online returned
&
about 81% of merchants are now charging their customers a fee for at least some form of returns.
&
Free shipping is more important to shoppers than same-day delivery
Three-fourths of U.S. online consumers said free shipping is among the most important criteria they consider when deciding where to shop online
Beware viral trends:
It seems people spent the last few days of 2023 encouraging their followers to get to know them better. Or, according to one cyber-security expert, helping potential hackers access their information.
_via Business Insider