I help brand, marketing, and insights teams understand what shoppers are doing, why they’re doing it, and what to do next. Then I teach your team to read it for themselves.
Brands pay for insights and get handed a slide deck.
Your team already buys research, analytics, and social listening. The numbers say one thing. Your reviews, comments, and DMs say another. Nobody in the room can explain the gap, so decisions default to the loudest opinion.
I’m not another insights vendor. I’m the translation layer. I take the research you already have, put it next to what consumers are actually saying, and work with your team until everyone reads the consumer the same way.
Same shoppers. Smarter decisions.
Ways to work together
Four ways in. One way of reading the consumer.
Every engagement runs on the same method, so what your team learns in one carries into the next.
01 · Team Training
The Consumer Decode for Teams
A four-part curriculum that teaches your team to read consumers the way I do. Each module is a half day, built around a live exercise on your own reviews and comments.
The Buying Iceberg: what drives the decision below the surface
The Trust Stack: where consumer trust breaks before the sale
The Occasion Gap: when and why people actually buy
The Female Consumer Code, or consumer language for non-beauty brands
Best for: brand, marketing, insights, and innovation teams who need a shared way to read the consumer.
Start with one briefing for your leadership team on what your consumers are telling you right now. Keep going with a quarterly retainer: every three months I come back in, refresh the read, and pressure-test the decisions on your calendar.
A briefing for CEOs, CMOs, and VPs on your category and consumer
A quarterly read of your reviews, comments, and research
A standing advisor for launches, positioning, and big calls
Best for: leadership teams heading into a launch, a repositioning, or a new retailer.
When the decision is too big to rest on what you already have, I run the study. Custom consumer panels with behavioral analysis and a findings session your team can act on.
100 respondents for a directional read
200 to 300 for segmentation and cross-tabs
400 and up for subgroup comparisons you can stand behind
Best for: packaging, shelf, and positioning decisions with real money behind them.
We talk about where your team feels stuck, who you think your consumer is, and what's on the calendar. No pitch.
Step 02
Briefing or study
Most brands start with an executive briefing or a focused study, so you see how I read your consumer before committing to more.
Step 03
Training
Your team learns the method through the four-module curriculum, using your own reviews and comments.
Step 04
Quarterly advisory
Every three months I come back in to refresh the read and keep decisions grounded as your brand grows.
A few official things
Why brands trust the read.
PhD in Business Administration, marketing concentration, focused on consumer behavior
Marketing professor who teaches this method every term
Member of ESOMAR and the Insights Association
Former Director of Marketing at a healthcare system
Commentary for national outlets, podcasts, and the Inside the Consumer Mind newsletter
Method in action · Tippy Type
No price, no proof, no idea what it was. Until 100 shoppers said so.
Tippy Type was heading into 500 Walmart stores with a basic display. I ran a blind panel of 100 shoppers with the brand hidden to find out what the shelf was actually telling them.
What shoppers needed
To see the price
To know what other buyers thought
To find it on TikTok and Instagram
To touch it before buying
The recommendation
Show the price, add social proof, and attach a physical sample to the display.
Ready when you are
Your team has a consumer question it hasn't been able to answer.
You don't need to know which offer fits. Tell me what's on the calendar and where the team feels stuck, and I'll tell you where I'd start.
Fishwife first caught my eye because of the packaging. Those illustrated boxes are impossible to walk past. What turned me into a real fan was the tuna, which is now a staple in our pantry.
So when @fishwife started showing up in my skincare feed, I had to dig in.
Over the past few years, this tinned fish brand has partnered with a chili crisp maker, an olive oil brand, a sandal company, a vermouth maker, an indie band, Whole Foods, Sweetgreen, and now Dieux skincare. At first glance, it looks random. The closer I looked, the clearer the pattern got.
I’m calling it the Collab Ladder. 1. In the tin: flavor partnerships, like Fly By Jing chili crisp salmon 2. On the table: olive oil, vinegar, kitchenware, candles 3. On you: jewelry, sandals, skincare 4. In culture: smoked salmon for Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE 5. In the world: Whole Foods totes and a Sweetgreen salad
Each rung moves the brand a little further from the shelf and a little closer to your identity.
Why it works, from a consumer behavior lens: -Moderate incongruity. A little surprise makes us pay closer attention, especially when we can figure out why two brands belong together (Meyers-Levy & Tybout, 1989).
-Distinctive brand assets. One illustrator, Danny Miller, gives everything the same look, so you recognize Fishwife in any aisle.
-Self-congruity. We gravitate toward brands that reflect who we are, or who we want to be. That’s why someone who never eats anchovies might still want the tote.
A fun detail: per its Shark Tank pitch, Fishwife grew from $750K in revenue in 2021 to $2.6M in 2022, and as of 2022 it wasn’t running paid ads. Collabs and community did a lot of the heavy lifting.
For brands: map your customer before your category. For you: next time a collab stops your scroll, notice which rung got you.
Which unlikely collab got your money? Tell me below.
Hurricane Isaias just came through, and it reminded me of something every Southerner already knows: when the Waffle House closes, it’s serious.
We were lucky, with minimal damage. A lot of our neighbors were not.
The Waffle House Index is one of my favorite examples of how trust works. A restaurant that stays open on Christmas morning, at 3 a.m., and through ice storms has spent years teaching us what normal looks like. So when the doors lock, we feel it before any forecast tells us to.
Swipe through for the psychology behind it, and stay for the last slide. A closed Waffle House is a great signal, and your local officials still make the call on when to leave.
Save this one for the next storm, and tell me below: when a storm is coming, what do you check first, the forecast or the Waffle House?
I learned to needlepoint as a kid, along with hand embroidery, cross-stitch, and sewing. My mom is the absolute queen of crafty, and she’s Southern, which means those skills come bundled with learning how to set a table, host, and entertain. Apparently it all goes together.
So when needlepoint started trending again, I’ll admit I side-eyed it. It felt a little kitschy. Even though I bought a GIANT stocking to stitch and it’s still there rolled up 3 years later. Because IG influenced me.
Then I walked into @lycettedesigns in Palm Beach and found the perfect reason to pick the needle back up: an ornament for my daughter’s first year as an angel in The Nutcracker.
The woman helping me also mentioned the beginner canvases, and I picked a little sand dollar for my daughter, because I always bring her sand dollars home from my dives. She’s been stitching it the last few days, and now it’s something we can do together.
I also haven’t jumped on the mahjong train yet, because I truly don’t have the time. Stitching, though, I can do while I wait through three dances classes a week.
And yes, I completely skipped my due diligence on how expensive this hobby is. Which is exactly why I had to decode it. Swipe through for why a $300 canvas feels worth it, and why every stitcher has a “my shop.”
I’d seen @marvis_usa for years but was never brave enough to try it.
…And no, I did not find it while I was in PB. So, I’ll be ordering it online now.
Anthropologie, C.O. Bigelow, Revolve, every “things to buy in Europe” list on my feed. I admired that tube every single time. But I was a Sensodyne loyalist, and toothpaste is one of my most autopilot purchases.
It took a hotel in Palm Beach and a free sample sitting on the bathroom counter to finally get me to try it.
And as someone who teaches this for a living, I had to laugh. I walked right into the exact strategy I explain to brands.
Two behavioral forces worked together here: The Category Escape moved Marvis out of the toothpaste aisle in my mind and into beauty, wellness, and Italian souvenir territory, where $10.50 feels like a small luxury.
The Loyalty Solvent removed the cost and risk of trying it, in a setting where I was already in treat-myself mode.
The escape built the desire. The sample got the trial.
Swipe through for the full breakdown, plus what brands in commodity categories can borrow from this playbook.
Now I want to know: what product did a sample convert you to? Tell me below.
I’ve wanted to stay at The Colony Palm Beach for years, but every time we’ve been in Palm Beach, it’s been booked. So when I found out @thesouthernc Retreat was being hosted here, I finally had my reason.
If you love pink and all things Palm Beach, this place is a dream. I first fell for it on Instagram, and in person it’s even more photogenic. There’s a photo moment around every corner, the theme runs through everything, and a chartreuse dress with pink feathers fits right in.
As a consumer behaviorist, I kept noticing how the whole stay pulls you into the brand. @thecolonypalmbeach is a lifestyle you get to live inside for a few days, and by the time you leave, you feel like part of it.
Then I heard Sarah Wetenhall and her longtime PR partner Malcolm Carfrae (Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren) break down how they build it on purpose. I love learning how the PR side really works, and this made everything click.
Swipe to see how a hotel turns a stay into a brand you take home.
Which hotel has convinced you to bring something home? Tell me what you bought.
I love a good pop-up, so when Chanel’s Café Mademoiselle lined up with my NYC trip, I knew I had to stop in. Finding the elusive 587 The New Smoky palette was an even bigger bonus.
What I didn’t expect was to walk into a textbook case study in experiential marketing.
From the moment I joined the line to the little package I carried out, Chanel gave me a familiar role to play: café guest. I was seated, guided through the fragrances, handed a “menu,” and given things to do and take home. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I bought the palette and a lipstick. That’s the part I study.
The café was beautiful, but what stayed with me was how each step led to the next, and how the same idea showed up in Chanel’s campaign well beyond New York.
I broke down the full experience, the consumer behavior behind it, and what smaller brands can borrow in the latest Inside the Consumer Mind.
Would you bring an iced coffee into a job interview?
A friend of mine at @7newsdc posted a clip of the anchors debating this, and one of them called it an “emotional support beverage.” As soon as I heard that phrase, I knew I wanted to write about it.
Because you might barely touch the drink once you sit down. It’s already done something for you by then. You picked up your usual order, had something to hold on the way in, and brought a little piece of your routine into a room where you don’t know what’s coming. Of course, the interviewer may read that same cup differently.
One person sees someone comfortable and confident. Another sees someone being too casual. Neither of them knows what the drink means to the person holding it.
That’s the fascinating part: we use products to feel a certain way, but other people use those same products to decide what kind of person we are.
So be honest: are you walking in with your emotional support beverage, or leaving it in the car? 👇
Yesterday I broke down how Fenty Skin, Wonder Bath, Glow Recipe, and Huda Beauty ended up with remarkably similar eye patch grinders. Today I’m watching what happened next and it’s one of the best examples of reactive marketing I’ve seen this year.
Fenty made the first joke with the Spider-Man pointing meme. Glow Recipe declared everything fine while the room burned. Huda called the girls in for a reality-show-style sit-down about a certain manufacturer. And Wonder Bath, which had already used the slicing mechanism for its serum, staged a race and won it.
Then brands outside the original story joined in. KISS brought popcorn. Bubble joked about getting dragged into eye mask gate with a 2027 launch plan. WonderSkin made a movie poster. Laneige tried to piece together the lore, Beauty of Joseon snuck into the party, and Onyx even imagined nail patches in a grinder.
This is reactive marketing, but the part I love is what it did to the products. Fenty gave the grinders arms and someone to point at. The other brands gave them reactions, rivalries, and jokes. Suddenly, we weren’t just comparing packaging. We were following characters and picking favorites.
And if you’d been following along, every new post felt like an inside joke you got to be part of. The products haven’t all hit shelves yet. The conversation is already doing the marketing.
You’ve probably seen the viral twist jar on your feed this week.
Twist the top, and a fresh under-eye patch slices off.
The mechanism itself isn’t new. Korean brand @wonderbath_global has used the same format for its sliced face serum since this summer - and the twist-and-cut dispenser appears to come from South Korean packaging manufacturer Samhwa.
What is new? @glowrecipe , @huda , and @fentyskin all launched under-eye versions within days of one another.
That doesn’t necessarily mean anyone copied anyone.
Beauty brands don’t always design their packaging from scratch. They choose from formats developed by packaging suppliers, then customize them with their own formulas, colors, and branding. If a brand wants exclusive access, it usually has to pay for it.
So when everyone shows up wearing the same outfit, the only thing left to differentiate on is personality.
Two beauty stories proved that this week:
One product-name dispute became emotional. One brand posted a meme.
Like most millennials, I loved Save the Last Dance when it came out, and I’ve always been a huge fan of @missjuliastiles .
In fact, senior year of high school, I tried to recreate Sara Johnson’s final dance for my school’s Miss CHS pageant. I can confirm: I did not do it nearly as gracefully as Sara.
So when Julia Stiles was announced for Dancing With the Stars, the internet absolutely lost its millennial mind.
Because obviously she had an unfair advantage. She went to Juilliard. Except she didn’t. Sara Johnson did. And that was the joke.
Which is why Juilliard’s response became so interesting. They fact-checked a joke nobody was confused about, while the rest of the internet - Columbia, Carnegie Hall, Sarah Lawrence, Julia herself - understood exactly what was happening.
Then, two weeks later, Juilliard came back and finally joined the bit. And that recovery might be the best part of the entire story. Because this isn’t really about Julia Stiles or Juilliard.
It’s about cultural fluency. Brands can be factually correct and still completely misread the room.
And sometimes the smartest thing a brand can do isn’t correct the audience. It’s say, “yes, and.”
ETA: Quick marketing note: universities/schools are brands, as well. Brand doesn’t just mean “company selling a product.” Juilliard has a name, reputation, audience, positioning, and decades of cultural meaning attached to it - which is part of why this moment was so interesting in the first place.
I love a good experiential campaign, and when it involves a weekend-long pop-up, I am here for it.
Fragrance is one of those things I have to test myself. I want to know how it smells on me, not how it smells in a Reel or on a paper blotter.
Which is why two fragrance cafés opening in New York the same weekend caught my attention. One is Chanel, reintroducing a scent everyone already knows. The other is @dedcool , launching one nobody has smelled yet. Same format, opposite problems, identical mechanism.
Admission to both is free. That’s the whole strategy. You paid in attention, travel, and a queue before you ever touched a bottle, and by the time you’re inside, the basket takes care of itself.
Swipe for the breakdown, and tell me: do you blind buy fragrance, or do you need it on skin first?
I’m a huge @ahoffmanwriter fan, and Practical Magic is one of the very rare cases where I love the movie just as much as I love the books. Add in the fact that I’m also a Halloween person and a @mackenziechilds person, and this collaboration basically stacked four things I already love into one very dangerous shopping situation.
Which is also exactly why it’s such a good consumer behavior case.
As the Practical Magic 2 collaborations started rolling out, I kept watching how brands were translating the world of the story into products. But MacKenzie-Childs is the one that really got me, because it doesn’t feel like someone slapped a movie logo onto a pumpkin.
It already belongs there.
The maximalism. The whimsy. The slightly eccentric, collected-over-time feeling. It looks like it could have been sitting in the Owens house all along.
That’s what I call borrowed meaning.
The product doesn’t have to build the emotional connection from scratch. It gets to inherit decades of story, nostalgia, characters, rituals, and memory that the consumer already brings with them.
And when the fit is right, you aren’t just buying the object. You’re buying everything the object already means.
In my case: Alice Hoffman + Practical Magic + Halloween + MacKenzie-Childs.
They knew exactly what they were doing. Now the real question is whether I’ll still want the pumpkin in February. (Which, yes I will.)
Comment WITCHY and I’ll send you the link to the piece on Substack.
For years, I went to the same plastic surgeon for Botox. Safe, consistent, never a surprise.
But this time I wanted facial balancing and lips, and I wanted someone whose eye I trusted with the whole face.
So I did what every consumer does now. Google reviews. The local Reddit thread. Instagram. TikTok. But I wasn’t really reading ratings. I was studying faces.
I even watched a girl from 30A drive two and a half hours to Pensacola for a med spa she found on reels.
Nobody drives that far for a Google rating.
Then I went straight to the injectors’ own profiles, because a five-star review tells me you had a nice appointment.
A portfolio tells me whether I trust your judgment.
Then came the real research: the dance moms. Who does your Botox? Who did your lips? Would you go back? And when someone looked especially good, I asked her directly.
That’s what makes aesthetics such an interesting category: the customer leaves wearing the result.
Every great outcome is a walking referral. Every bad one is, too. The search went public. It used to be a whispered name. Now it’s the group chat, with photos.
And the lesson wasn’t really about Botox. When the outcome is visible, expensive, personal, and hard to undo, reviews matter. Branding matters. The office matters. But the work wins.
More on where the aesthetic budget is going next week.
I’m the type of person that packs all I can into a trip. Downtime is a rumor.
Normally I land in New York with every hour already booked. This time I’m leaving the gaps open on purpose. I’ll be in the city September 15 to 19 for @makeupin_world , the @cewinsider Beauty Expo, and client meetings, and I want the rest of the schedule to come from you.
Swipe for what I’m looking for, then drop your favorites below. I’ll go, I’ll take notes, and I’ll write about what I find.
If you’ll be at MakeUp in New York or CEW, say hi! And if you’re a brand, retailer, or PR team with something happening that week, my DMs are open.
This week I reached for a can of @batiste_hair I’ve had for over a year. Meanwhile there’s a drawer of prestige dry shampoo samples I’ve been saving for the day my old faithful finally runs out.
I study why people buy for a living, and I’m still doing it. That’s the whole story of this category.
Prestige dry shampoo is growing 10% a year, twice the rate of mass. Batiste has been the number one dry shampoo for six straight years. Both are true, because the growth isn’t coming from people dumping their drugstore can. It’s coming from a category that got reclassified in our heads.
Twenty years ago dry shampoo was powder on greasy roots. Now it’s biotech odor science, scalp microalgae, squalane and hyaluronic acid. Once a product moves from shortcut to treatment, the price ceiling moves with it. And because dry shampoo fails somewhere shampoo never does (on your head, in public), paying more starts to feel like a fix instead of a splurge.
That’s why it’s become the gateway. @amika says Perk Up is often the very first prestige hair product Gen Z and Gen Alpha ever buy. You don’t have to believe the whole brand is better. You just have to find one product that solves something your old one didn’t.
Yesterday Dyson launched a $500 toothbrush. Today SURI launched a $75 one.
It’s not that toothbrushes got expensive. It’s that oral care changed enough that these prices make sense.
For most of my life, this was a compliance category. You bought enough to keep your dentist happy and there was no reason to keep trading up. Compliance has a natural price ceiling.
Beauty doesn’t. Beauty sells movement toward an ideal self, and aspiration has almost no ceiling at all.
Watch how the category made the move. Toothpaste is merchandised at Violet Grey and Ulta. Flaus landed on Oprah’s Favorite Things. MOON put a whitening pen in Kendall Jenner’s hands and sized it for a makeup bag. Anthropologie sells mouthwash under beauty.
Then look at how SURI talks about the Core. Haze. Ember. Nightfall. Moonrise. A magnetic mirror mount, because this is meant to stay visible instead of disappearing into a drawer.
That is not medicine cabinet behavior. That is bathroom vanity behavior.
It can look like beauty and still has to talk like healthcare. Dentist-designed. 100% more plaque removed. Pressure sensor. The clinical credential is what lets you rationalize an emotional purchase.
I want it because it’s beautiful. I can justify it because it works.
The toothbrush didn’t improve fast enough to explain any of this. What changed is that teeth became part of the appearance package.
Comment VANITY and I’ll send you the full breakdown on Substack.
I remember my first @dyson . I was in college with a Lab puppy and an apartment losing a war against dog hair, and my mom gifted me one of those giant Ball uprights for Christmas. I thought I was beyond fancy. Because even back then those things were expensive.
Since then I have bought stick vacuums, hair dryers, Airwraps, fans. I keep finding new reasons to buy back into the same ecosystem, which is exactly why the $500 CameraJet interests me more than the price tag does.
Dyson has spent years teaching us to look at an ordinary household object and ask “do I need the Dyson version,” which is a completely different question from “do I need one of these.” They did it to vacuums. Then hair dryers. Then styling tools. Then the air in your house. Now your mouth.
And CameraJet is a whole counter system. Replacement heads, toothpaste, mouthrinse, and whatever Dyson decides belongs there next. The hardware gets them in. The refills keep them there.
We already know we are supposed to floss. Education was never the problem, friction was. So Dyson folded flossing into something you were already doing, then added a camera and a dashboard to make an invisible routine visible.
That is a bigger bet than a toothbrush. It is a bet that oral care becomes beauty tech.
Given my own purchase history, I am in no position to judge whoever buys it.
Swipe through for what the toothpaste tells you about the business model.
Sometimes the smartest crisis response does not come from the brand in crisis at all.
This is one of the biggest things I teach my students about PR and crisis management.
Acknowledging the issue matters. But consumers are also watching to see what you actually do about it. A statement tells people you know something went wrong. Action tells them the response changed something.
This is where corporate social responsibility becomes especially important. CSR is not just something a brand talks about when everything is going well. In a crisis it can become part of the response itself. It gives consumers something tangible to evaluate and can shape what they do next, because now they are not just hearing what a brand believes. They are seeing what it is willing to support, change, or give up.
The response stayed almost entirely internal. Apology, investigation, a changed approval process. All real, all impossible for a consumer to verify.
And then Zalea’s entered the conversation, despite having nothing to do with creating the original issue.
I found them by accident. I was scrolling Threads, saw someone share their response, got curious, went to their Instagram, watched the reel, and immediately started reading the comments.
Their response was brilliant. They understood the cultural moment, responded in a way that made complete sense for their existing brand, and put real action behind it by pledging 20% of online sales through September 8 to a women’s domestic violence shelter.
That is reaction PR done well. They did not create the crisis. They did not need to insert themselves into it. But they understood what consumers were feeling and found a credible place for their brand to show up.
The comments are where this becomes a consumer behavior case study. Women talking about replacing Callaway headcovers. Some saying this was enough to finally make them buy. Others saying they do not even golf and wanted to order anyway.
Consumers do not just want acknowledgment. They want evidence that something changed because of it.
I have never used a dating app. But I have enjoyed swiping left or right on my friends’ phones and living vicariously through them, which I would argue is the most fun way to use one.
So when Bumble showed up on SMU’s campus twice in seven days, I was not watching for the romance angle. I was watching the timing.
August 17, the last day of work week, a Bumble-yellow truck pulled up to every sorority house with bouquets from Le Bloom and treats from Bon Bon. August 24, the first day of classes, a wrapped vintage Airstream parked on campus handing out Mamaka Bowls refreshers.
Those look like two cute activations. They are one strategy.
The first one landed at the emotional floor of the entire recruitment calendar, when she has spent days decorating and rehearsing on almost no sleep. We remember the most intense part of an experience and how it ended, and Bumble changed the ending from exhaustion to flowers.
The second one landed on the biggest temporal landmark of the academic year, the one morning when everybody on a campus is willing to start a new routine, meet new people, and become a slightly different version of themselves.
And Bumble asked for nothing either time. No QR code, no download to claim. The second a gift comes with a requirement, the brain starts pricing the exchange and the goodwill evaporates.
The partners were the proof it belonged there. Whitney Wolfe Herd is an SMU alum and Kappa Kappa Gamma. Le Bloom founder Layne Tenenbaum is an SMU alum and Delta Delta Delta. Two chapters, two founders, one campus.
You can buy attention. You cannot buy belonging. @bumble went and stood inside a place where belonging already existed, and then opened the door to everyone else a week later.
Everyone keeps asking me the same thing about bid day. How can they possibly afford this?
Wrong question. The better one is what kind of economic system makes this possible in the first place.
So I modeled one. A 400 member Alabama chapter, built entirely from published fee levels, lands around $4.2M in annual member payments and approaches $4.7M at the higher tiers. That is revenue and it is not profit. It funds house staff, commercial kitchens, meal service, utilities, insurance, maintenance, national fees and capital obligations. These are multimillion dollar operations, not multimillion dollar checking accounts.
Most brands spend money trying to convince a consumer to choose them. Rush reverses the entire direction of that effort. The consumer invests money, time, appearance, social capital and enormous emotional energy trying to be chosen by the brand.
Scarcity is not sitting outside this model. Scarcity is generating the value. I grew up inside blue collar family businesses, so I learned to read a P and L before I learned to read a brand. The degrees came later. That is why I look at recruitment and see customer acquisition instead of tradition.
I went much deeper this week. The Auburn comparison, the SEC price spread, what brand activations are actually buying, and the $24,000 line item nobody talks about.
Comment MATH and I will send you the full breakdown.
