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One Brand Took Years to Build Trust in a Taboo Category. The Other Lost It in 24 Hours: What TENA and Pepsi Reveal About the Real Determinants of Marketing Success
Pepsi had the bigger budget, the bigger celebrity, and one of the decade’s most public brand failures. TENA had a stigmatized product category and built a compounding brand asset. A structural analysis of what actually separated the outcomes: insight versus…
Latest Research
- One Brand Took Years to Build Trust in a Taboo Category. The Other Lost It in 24 Hours: What TENA and Pepsi Reveal About the Real Determinants of Marketing Success
- The Influence Your Analytics Can’t See: Measuring Dark Social’s Impact on Offline Retail Sales — and What Brands Should Do About It
- Open Weights and the Open-Closed Choice: What Jensen Huang’s First X Post Argues, and What the Data Shows
- Do Vibes Predict Recessions? What a New San Francisco Fed Paper Tells Us About Sentiment as an Early-Warning Signal
- The Grocery Pullback: US Shoppers Buy Fewer Items as Seven Years of Food Inflation Catches Up
- The Wire Bottleneck: Why the AI Buildout Runs on Electricians the U.S. Has Not Trained
- The Boom and the Gap: Twenty Years of North Texas Growth, Prices, and Mortgage Access
- The EU Delayed Its AI Act by 16 Months. U.S. States Just Passed 19 More AI Laws. An Economic Look at What Any Company Operating in Both Markets Now Has to Comply With
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
– W. Edwards Deming
AI
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State Farm’s AI Push Sparks Fears of Mass Job Losses: What 19,000 Agents Just Learned, How Social Media Reacted, and What the Economics Actually Say
State Farm is replacing the contracts of 19,000 independent agents with a single new agreement that mandates daily AI use, cuts commissions…
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AI Layoffs: Real Cause or Convenient Excuse? What the Data on Pandemic-Era Overstaffing Actually Shows
AI was cited in 40 percent of US layoff announcements in May 2026. The Federal Reserve says only 1 percent of services…
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When a Toilet Maker Becomes a Chip Supplier: How AI Is Reshaping Manufacturing in 2026
A 108-year-old toilet maker is sending more than half its capex to chip ceramics. A construction firm has watched data centers swell…
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The Strong Jobs Report Hides a Quieter Story: AI Is Erasing 16,000 US Jobs Every Month
The US added 172,000 jobs in May 2026, more than double the consensus forecast. Beneath the headline, Goldman Sachs has quantified a…
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How Anthropic Took the Throne: Inside the Valuation Arc That Made Series A Investors a Thousand Times Richer
Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO on June 1, 2026, at a $965 billion private mark. The Series A investors who put…
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How Anthropic Passed OpenAI: A $965 Billion Bet, a Personal Feud, and Two Theories of AI
In May 2026, Anthropic disclosed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation, surpassing OpenAI to become the highest-valued private…
Society
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Do Vibes Predict Recessions? What a New San Francisco Fed Paper Tells Us About Sentiment as an Early-Warning Signal
A new San Francisco Fed working paper puts a defensible number on the marginal recession-forecasting content of soft data. The soft-data model…
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The Grocery Pullback: US Shoppers Buy Fewer Items as Seven Years of Food Inflation Catches Up
US grocery unit sales fell 1.8 percent in June 2026, a sharp reversal from the modest growth recorded a year earlier. Federal…
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The Boom and the Gap: Twenty Years of North Texas Growth, Prices, and Mortgage Access
A twenty-year data audit of North Texas: Celina and its Collin County neighbors lead the U.S. in population growth, while Dallas home…
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Tesla Robotaxi Turns One: A Neutral Economic Look at What Year One Proved, How Tesla Compares to Waymo, and Why the Same Data Supports Two Opposite Stories
One year after Tesla launched its Robotaxi service in Austin with about ten vehicles and human safety monitors, the fleet covers the…
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State Farm’s AI Push Sparks Fears of Mass Job Losses: What 19,000 Agents Just Learned, How Social Media Reacted, and What the Economics Actually Say
State Farm is replacing the contracts of 19,000 independent agents with a single new agreement that mandates daily AI use, cuts commissions…
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Warsh’s First Fed Meeting Flips the 2026 Outlook From Cut to Hike: An Economic Look at the New Communications Framework, the May 4.2% CPI Print, and What Borrowers, Savers, and Investors Should Track Next
In his first meeting as Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh held rates at 3.50-3.75 percent, slashed the policy statement to roughly 132…
Marketing & Strategy
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One Brand Took Years to Build Trust in a Taboo Category. The Other Lost It in 24 Hours: What TENA and Pepsi Reveal About the Real Determinants of Marketing Success
Pepsi had the bigger budget, the bigger celebrity, and one of the decade’s most public brand failures. TENA had a stigmatized product…
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The Influence Your Analytics Can’t See: Measuring Dark Social’s Impact on Offline Retail Sales — and What Brands Should Do About It
Most consumer sharing happens in private channels that analytics record as direct traffic — or miss entirely when the purchase happens offline…
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The EU Delayed Its AI Act by 16 Months. U.S. States Just Passed 19 More AI Laws. An Economic Look at What Any Company Operating in Both Markets Now Has to Comply With
The European Union deferred the AI Act’s high-risk obligations by 12 to 16 months while U.S. states continued to enact new AI…
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Why Snap Judgments Fail Modern Market Research: What Blink, The Dress, and the Biology of Memory Reveal
Malcolm Gladwell popularized snap judgments in Blink. Twenty years of cognitive neuroscience and consumer research suggest that for ordinary consumers evaluating unfamiliar…
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Beyond the 57% Rule: How the Modern Buyer Journey Reached 80% Self-Directed
The often-quoted “57% rule” claimed that B2B buyers complete more than half of their purchase decision before talking to sales. By 2024,…
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Why Apple’s New CEO Inherits a Strategy That Cannot Win the AI Era
Apple’s CEO transition arrives at precisely the moment when its AI strategy is most exposed. Tim Cook hands the keys to John…
View all Marketing & Strategy →
Technology
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Tesla Robotaxi Turns One: A Neutral Economic Look at What Year One Proved, How Tesla Compares to Waymo, and Why the Same Data Supports Two Opposite Stories
One year after Tesla launched its Robotaxi service in Austin with about ten vehicles and human safety monitors, the fleet covers the…
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SpaceX Closes the Largest IPO in History: An Economic Look at What the Company Does, How It Got Here, and Whether USD 1.77 Trillion Is Justified
SpaceX raised USD 75 billion at a USD 1.77 trillion valuation in the largest IPO ever recorded. An economic look at the…
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China Has Won the Humanoid Factory Race. Now It Has a Demand Problem
Ten days ago, AcadeResearch argued that China had built the humanoid factories first. New AP reporting from Hong Kong confirms it: AGIBOT…
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IEEE Reveals 2026 Predictions for Top Technology Trends
IEEE Computer Society’s annual technology forecast identifies AI-driven automation, datacenter energy innovation, and adaptive healthcare as 2026’s dominant megatrends, with frontier areas…
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Nvidia and Microsoft Just Reinvented the Windows PC. Intel, ARM, and Apple Should Pay Attention
Microsoft and Nvidia unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra and RTX Spark superchip at Computex 2026: 1 petaflop of AI compute, 128 GB…
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China Just Hit Humanoid Factory Scale Before the US Did. Here’s What That Actually Means
On May 29, a Chinese factory in Shenzhen began shipping a full-size humanoid robot every 15 minutes. The story is not who…
Cybersecurity
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France’s ANSSI Sets 2027 Deadline to Ban Non-Quantum-Resistant Encryption: What the World’s First PQC Mandate Means
France’s ANSSI announced it will stop certifying products without post-quantum cryptography by 2027, the world’s first hard regulatory deadline for PQC. An…
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AI Is Rewriting the Cyber Threat Economy. Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Finance Are Bearing the Cost
For the first time in 19 years of the Verizon DBIR, vulnerability exploitation has overtaken stolen credentials as the top initial-access vector.…
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Q Day Is Closer Than You Think: How Quantum Computers Will Break Encryption, the Bitcoin Attack Window, and What Organizations Must Do Now
Most experts still place Q Day in the 2030s, but in twelve months, three research papers have reduced the quantum resources needed…
Economics & Finance
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Open Weights and the Open-Closed Choice: What Jensen Huang’s First X Post Argues, and What the Data Shows
Nvidia’s chief executive published his first X post to share a joint industry letter signed by 25 organizations, arguing open-weight AI models…
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Do Vibes Predict Recessions? What a New San Francisco Fed Paper Tells Us About Sentiment as an Early-Warning Signal
A new San Francisco Fed working paper puts a defensible number on the marginal recession-forecasting content of soft data. The soft-data model…
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The Grocery Pullback: US Shoppers Buy Fewer Items as Seven Years of Food Inflation Catches Up
US grocery unit sales fell 1.8 percent in June 2026, a sharp reversal from the modest growth recorded a year earlier. Federal…
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The Wire Bottleneck: Why the AI Buildout Runs on Electricians the U.S. Has Not Trained
The AI economy has the capital to expand and the compute to grow. It does not have the wires. A twenty-year retirement…
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The Boom and the Gap: Twenty Years of North Texas Growth, Prices, and Mortgage Access
A twenty-year data audit of North Texas: Celina and its Collin County neighbors lead the U.S. in population growth, while Dallas home…
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May JOLTS Beats Consensus by 294,000 as Warsh Uses Sintra to Cement the End of Forward Guidance: An Economic Look at the July 29 Rate Debate
Job openings held near a two-year high in May 2026, running about 294,000 above consensus, while new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh used…