McKinsey’s partners suffer from collective self-delusion
“One of the best explanations for the triumph of a “solution shop” like McKinsey was co-written by the late Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School in 2013. When hiring a management-consulting firm, he said, clients do not know what they are getting in advance, because they are looking for knowledge that they themselves lack. They cannot measure the results, either, because outside factors, such as the quality of execution, influence the outcome of the consultant’s recommendations.”
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Planning for marketing planning: 14 steps to an effective presentation
“There is no consistency out there in the world of marketing to delineate between brand plans and marketing plans. Many younger marketers assume there are fixed rules, to which they are currently not a party, that nut all of this out in gratuitous detail. Trust me, no such guidelines exist. The practical reality of planning is that marketing plans and brand plans usually mean the same thing. The title you use comes down to the brand architecture of your company and not some hard-and-fast procedural rulebook.”
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The biggest benefit of returning to the office is internal competition
“Right now, in corporations around the globe, working-group committees are focusing in hard on one of those ‘positive unintended consequences’. The problem these squads have been tasked with solving is how and in what order to get people back to the office. That has forced them to confront a tricky question: once the pandemic is over, what makes working at the office superior to working from home?”
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How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices
“Researchers call these design and wording decisions “dark patterns,” a term applied to UX that tries to manipulate your choices. When Instagram repeatedly nags you to “please turn on notifications,” and doesn’t present an option to decline? That’s a dark pattern. When LinkedIn shows you part of an InMail message in your email, but forces you to visit the platform to read more? Also a dark pattern. When Facebook redirects you to “log out” when you try to deactivate or delete your account? That’s a dark pattern too.”
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TikTok is nothing new – to marketers, it’s just another ad platform
“We’ve lived through a decade of conference bullshit about reducing the duopoly’s grip on the digital advertising dollar through new ‘hard-hitting’ government policies or worthy (very temporary) advertiser bans. Both Google and Facebook have pretended to listen and learn but have actually just charged on regardless, with barely a blip in the respective EBITDAs. There was never any real potential to derail these two spectacular companies. If anything, the threat of sanction helped both platforms appear to be challenged when nothing could have been further from the truth.”
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Understatement Is the New Luxury
“That may be one of the reasons a number of projects are now backing away from spare-no-expense opulence and instead offering a more understated take on luxury. A handful of recently introduced buildings have handsome interiors with visually calm wood, stone, brick and tile that don’t cry out for attention. New model units are now furnished to appear more attainable than wildly aspirational. And some existing buildings are playing up the practical livability of their remaining units.”
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The Opioid that Made a Fortune for Its Maker — and for Its Prescribers
"Selling drugs is a relationship business. It’s best to do it in person. That is why, on a summer evening in 2012, Alec Burlakoff was out for dinner with Steven Chun, the owner of Sarasota Pain Associates. Burlakoff was a sales manager for Insys Therapeutics, an Arizona-based pharmaceutical company with only one branded product, a new and highly potent opioid painkiller called Subsys. Chun was a doctor who prescribed a lot of opioids."
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The Weird Science Behind Chain Restaurant Menus
"With in-house innovation and marketing departments, most chains don’t need restaurant consultants. Still, clients came to us with dozens of problems. Some had an idea for a new product line (breakfast tacos, seasonal smoothies) that they wished to benchmark against a new set of palates. Some wanted to break into office catering but didn’t know where to begin. Some weren’t even technically restaurants, such as the pay-by-the-hour workspace that wanted to keep customers on the premises. Still others hired us as a last resort. These were the chains circling the drain, bordering on irrelevance, caught in the throes of an identity crisis. We called this kind of project a “concept revitalization.”"
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Nintendo Labo review
“Walking someone through a complex task without being in the room is an incredibly tough nut to crack. Labo does it so well and with so much charm that it seems effortless. This aspect of the kits will likely be invisible to the folks who have an easy time building their contraptions, never having to consider the alternate universe in which the build is joyless and frustrating. The tutorials, in this way, are an impressive feat of design, writing and execution.”
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