The first time I bristled at the word “persona” was around 1998, when we were working on one of the early websites for Panasonic. One of our clients had come back all pumped up from a Forrester conference at which they declared personas were the only way to drive effective customer experiences. Next thing you know, we’re drafting faux bios of stereotypical visitors like Donna Dealseeker and Tom Techie ...

When I call my summer reading list “eclectic,” I’m not kidding. I’ve bounced from a Mary Renault classic to Lee Child’s latest; childhood memoirs from Trevor Noah and Tara Westover; biographies of Ben Franklin and Richard Holbrooke; Yuval Noah Harari’s look at the future and Georgia Hunter’s reimagining of how her Polish relatives survived the Holocaust. Since I listened to about half of these ...

If I’m going to shout anyone’s quotes from the rooftops, I’m glad they’re Thomas Barta’s. Why? Well, it’s not often you have an hour-long chat with someone who has enjoyed (and is enjoying) such a storied career. He was a partner and senior marketer at McKinsey, led the world’s largest study of marketing leadership (68,000 assessments—not too shabby!), published a book on ...

While I was checking out at a CVS the other day, the cashier asked me to do her a favor and complete a survey, circling a number on my receipt in the hopes that I would acknowledge the quality of her service on a designated website. And while she had done a competent job ringing up my Fisherman’s Lozenges and NyQuil, there was nothing extraordinary about our encounter, ...

As a dedicated “Zionist,” March Madness was a huge disappointment. This Duke team had what it takes to go all the way: loads of talent (including the best player in the country), perseverance, poise under pressure and legendary leadership. Yet despite all of this promise, Williamson’s team only made it to the Elite Eight, losing to Michigan State by a single point.

As it turns out, ...

If you do a search to find out how many podcasts there currently are on planet earth, the answer you find will likely have the caveat: "These numbers are approximate." One of the reasons the number can't be pinned down accurately is because new podcasts are proliferating so fast (while others are dying off). In other words, podcasting is still a very fluid, one might ...

Advertising history is cluttered with great taglines—a few carefully crafted words indelibly linked to one brand through hundreds of millions of ad impressions. You’re in Good Hands. Just Do It. Think Different. But few brands today have the kind of budgets that would make such lines stick in our consciousness, AND more importantly, savvier consumers seek out brands that back up such cleverness with real actions, both ...

CES is flat-out overwhelming. It’s a beat-the-clock search for the amazing, the transformational or the just plain cool, while not getting entranced by what the Japanese call “chindogu”—the stuff that’s almost, but not quite, useless. Take the Hoverbike, for example. It’s a flying motorcycle that every self-respecting Luke Skywalker fan will want immediately—until you learn it flies only 12 feet off the ground for 20 minutes ...

The silence was palpable when Gartner’s Brent Adamson challenged a group of otherwise upbeat B2B CMOs, "How are you preparing for the recession?" Until that moment, these CMOs, who hailed from a wide range of successful enterprises, simply hadn’t considered that either a downturn was imminent or that the possibility merited serious preparation. Nor had I.

But because “a crisis is a terrible thing ...