In many corporate boardrooms, competitive intelligence (CI) is treated like a post-game highlight reel. Strategy meetings open with a review of what rival brands launched, priced, or marketed over the previous quarter. While understanding recent moves has its place, relying on historical retrospectives is like driving forward while staring exclusively in the rearview mirror. In a fast-paced market where consumer preferences and technological capabilities shift overnight, look

The same customer who calls your service line expecting a patient, knowledgeable agent to walk them through a complex question is also the one using self-service tools when they want an answer at midnight. This is the customer experience paradox: the need for both deep, guided human connection and frictionless, always-on self-service isn't a contradiction. It's the new baseline. Brands winning on service aren't focusing on one or the other — they're building the infrastructur

Consumer behavior is in a constant state of rebalancing. When a trend that started out as a good thing has gone too far, consumers pull back — shifting their values and behavior in the opposite direction. Call it a “pendulum effect,” and our strategy and foresight teams are watching it happen in real time across three distinct areas. Brands that fail to evolve with these emerging attitudes and stick to the status quo risk being seen as tone deaf in the near future. 1. The I

We are living through a trust recession. The Edelman Trust Barometer characterizes today's climate as a global "crisis of grievance" that has descended into insularity. Events spanning past decades — from the 2008 financial crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic — that have steadily eroded trust in leaders and institutions. While brand trust has held up somewhat better than institutional trust, they are not immune. The response from forward-looking brands has been decisive: don't wa