James Forr

  We highlight a couple of new campaigns for established brands.  First, Unilever’s latest campaign for Slim-Fast, which is an attempt to appeal to what they think is the unconscious…

As you probably know, J.C. Penney last week fired its CEO, Ron Johnson, after a disastrous turnaround attempt. This article argues the failure is traceable to a fundamental misunderstanding of…

Here is a fantastic new ad from Gatorade that really shows the power of co-creation. No explicit product claims, not dialogue, no explanations.  You probably don’t even have to know…

Here is an example of customer service jujitsu, making a bad situation work to your advantage.  And it comes from an unlikely source – the U.S. airline industry. When a…

Brene Brown, a professor at the University of Houston and renowned shame researcher, recently created this blog post about shame Specifically, she discusses a new campaign in New York City…

College basketball fans currently are in the grip of March Madness.  According to the New York Times, the latest trend many university athletic departments have embraced, in an effort to…

  We were under the gun to come up with a Z-Files for today.  In fact, we were sweating bullets.  So we pulled the trigger on this story from NPR…

The New York Times just published an article about so-called transitional objects.  For you it might have been a teddy bear or a doll.  For Linus (above) it was his…

Here’s a report about a study in the Journal of Consumer Research that describes the noxious power of little white lies. Diners who are dissatisfied with their experience – but…

Kimberlyn Leary, Julianna Pillemer, and Michael Wheeler have authored an article in the Jan-Feb 2013 Harvard Business Review about the emotions involved in business negotiations. They used ZMET to understand…

From the Wall Street Journal, a recent article about the “masculine-ization” of parenting. More and more fathers (in the U.S., at least) are staying at home and raising their children…

This isn’t directly about marketing – it is more about product design.  It is the obituary of a Bell Labs researcher named John Karlin, who used the principles of industrial…