Play With Your Food
Play is what the food invites you to do. No. 02 of The Joy Dividend in Practice applies Playful Design to food and beverage product development.
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Insights
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A decade of analysis on the shifts changing consumers, categories and competition—kept intact, made searchable, and ready to use.
185 articles
Everything In Its Right Place
Stress-free product development for food & beverage, from the shelf to the empty package.
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Beyond the Plate: How GLP-1s Are Reshaping Beauty, Fitness, Travel and the Wardrobe
The most important GLP-1 story may not be what people stop eating. It may be what happens after the body changes.
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Make Them Work For It
Think about something you worked hard to make. A meal.
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The Parasocial Dividend: Creators as Makers or Breakers of Joy
The people inside a product can create extraordinary joy and loyalty. They can also break something no corporate statement can fully repair.
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The Standard Was Not Set in Your Category
Customers do not maintain separate expectations for every industry. The company resetting their standards may never appear in your competitive set.
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Don't Cry for Me, Argentina
We Design Beginnings. Nobody Designs the End.
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Load-Bearing Friction: What Are We Really Saving Time For?
Last week I took a taxi, and the driver — an older man — started talking to me about joy. “I used to love going to the bank,” he said.
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A Non-Working Cat
This week I don't want to talk about the science of joy, or even about branding. I want to talk about the joy of feeling seen.
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Community Is Worth the Friction. The Watch Party Proves It.
The couch in New Jersey had the better view. Higher definition, no transfers, no fare, a clean replay of every call.
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How I Met Your (Scrub) Daddy
I knew something was up when my son, of all people, recommended a dish sponge to me. He was maybe thirteen at the time and had never once volunteered an opinion about cleaning supplies.
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Sephora's Online Store Is Calm. That's the Problem.
Most brands measure what their customers did. Repeat purchase, basket size, conversion, NPS.
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Optimizing for Joy
The over-optimization backlash is not a retreat from progress. It is a shift toward designing brands, products and experiences around the emotional outcomes that compound.
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You're Gonna Lose That Girl
Marketers know retention beats acquisition. They just keep dating new people.
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Power to the People: A Three-Year Postscript
Three years ago I argued in a Cambridge handbook that brand-side NFTs would fail. They did.
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The Brand That Beat Amazon by Handing Customers the Calculator
Best Buy’s turnaround shows why brands should remove the customer’s core anxiety before investing in delight: calm first, joy second.
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Joyforaging Is the New Doomscrolling
Somewhere in the last two years, a quiet swap happened. The same person who used to open Twitter in line at the coffee shop is now opening NYT's Connections.
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Maxxing. For Grandma
Gen Z just invented a new word for living like your grandmother. They're calling it nonnamaxxing — nonna, the Italian word for grandma, plus the "-maxxing" suffix born in the darkest corners of internet hustle culture.
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