Happy Saturday. It’s been a pretty wild week in the world of business, finance, and politics. Unfortunately, I was traveling all week so I did much less research than I would’ve liked.
Quick note: Congrats to one of our regular readers, Andy Puzder of Hardee’s/CKE fame, for his appointment as Secretary of Labor. Best wishes!
Here are some of the more interesting things I saw in our data this week…
In today’s divided world, political disputes may not always be a bad thing for brands. You may have seen the news about the scuffle between Kellogg’s and Breitbart, over the former’s decision to pull its advertising from the latter. Breitbart then called for a boycott of Kellogg’s. Our data told us pretty definitively that Kellogg’s stands to gain more from the dispute than it will lose. Perhaps we will see more of these moves from brands in the new world of politics.
Maybe we just don’t like each other very much, and that’s why brick-and-mortar retail is struggling. We wrote a short piece on our blog this week about research into what people like the most and the least about shopping in stores for the holidays. 43% of people said there is absolutely nothing they like about the experience. What do they like the least? Crowds and lines, by a mile. Therein lies a messy predicament for physical retail. The more people there are in the store, the less anyone wants to be there. You can’t win.
Sprint jumped on the Pokemon Go bandwagon, but was it too late? Mobile carrier Sprint made an out-of-the-blue announcement this week about a cross-promotional partnership with Niantic, the maker of Pokemon Go. The problem according to our data is that the Pokemon Go craze seemed to have peaked many weeks ago. Maybe it will see some kind of resurgence but I wouldn’t bet on it – at least not like Sprint did.
That’s all I have to share with you this week. Put down your device and go Christmas shopping. I’ll write a lot more next week.
Have an awesome weekend.
JD
