Influencing Customer Purchase Decisions

When Johnson & Johnson spun off Kenvue, many of the leaders who joined saw it as an opportunity to operate in a fast, agile, stand-alone environment. Now, as Kimberly-Clark acquires Kenvue for nearly $49B, I can’t help but wonder: what happens to that kind of talent next? People who thrive in a start-up-like culture: speed, ownership, experimentation - often find it hard to adjust to a slower, more structured, process-heavy organization. And Kimberly-Clark, while world-class in legacy and discipline, is not known for agility or fast-paced innovation. So the question becomes: will Kimberly-Clark recognize and leverage the entrepreneurial talent they’ve just inherited or will those people eventually walk away, frustrated by hierarchy and pace? In M&A, most of the headlines focus on synergies and cost savings. But cultural integration is where deals often succeed or fail. Especially in consumer goods, where people and creativity drive performance more than any spreadsheet ever will. Curious to hear from my FMCG network: how can established giants like Kimberly-Clark preserve the innovative DNA of the companies they acquire? #FMCG #Growth #Trending #Consumergrowth

Menu design isn’t a creative exercise. It’s a commercial lever. On the left: Tomato Soup – $6 On the right: Slow-roasted tomato soup with vine-ripened tomatoes, fresh basil, and a touch of cream – $9 Nothing changed in the kitchen. Everything changed in perception. That is menu engineering in its simplest form. A better description does more than describe a dish. It shapes value. It can: • anchor price perception • guide guest decisions • increase willingness to spend • shift demand toward higher-margin items • support the broader commercial strategy of the asset Yet in luxury resorts, menus are still often treated like static lists rather than revenue tools. That is where value gets lost. Because pricing is not just cost plus markup. It is perceived value. And revenue optimisation does not stop at rooms. In many high-value assets, restaurants, bars, spas, and retail account for 30% to 60% of total revenue. But they are rarely managed with the same precision as rooms. That is the gap. And that is where asset management matters. Not by adding more outlets. Not by pushing prices blindly. By engineering each guest touchpoint to increase spend, strengthen perception, and improve experience at the same time. Same soup. Different strategy. Very different profitability. ➕ Hi, I am Judith Cartwright CRME, CHBA, ISHC, I post daily tips to increase profits. ♻️ Share this with your network. Black Coral Consulting

I interview a lot of performance marketers, and there’s one question no one till now has got it right! I ask them, "How many days should we retarget BOF audiences?" They take a deep breath, straighten up, and confidently say: 👉 "7, 14, and 30 days." Like they just cracked some secret code. So, I push further. "Why 7, 14, and 30?" Silence. A nervous smile. Maybe a generic answer like "That’s what everyone does." Most marketers run ads like they’re following a playbook, not understanding the psychology of a buyer. They apply the same fixed formula whether the product is a ₹500 lipstick or a ₹2,00,000 luxury watch. And guess what? That’s why their BOF campaigns underperform. They all know the technical side of running ads on Meta, but I often find one big gap in their thinking. Here’s the problem: BOF retargeting windows should not be fixed. They should be based on how long a customer takes to make a buying decision. If you sell a ₹499 pair of sunglasses, your customer doesn't need 30 days to decide. But if you sell a ₹50,000 camera, they’re not buying within 3 days either. The Right Way to Set BOF Retargeting Days 👇 💰 Impulse Buys (₹500 - ₹4,000) → BOF: 1-7 days 🛍️ Examples: Skincare, fashion accessories, snacks 📅 Why? People make quick decisions. If they haven’t bought in 7 days, they probably never will. 💰 Considered Purchases (₹4,000 - ₹25,000) → BOF: 3-14 days 🛍️ Examples: Sneakers, home decor, small appliances 📅 Why? Customers compare brands, check reviews, and take about a week or two to decide. 💰 High-Involvement Purchases (₹25,000 - ₹1,50,000) → BOF: 7-30 days 🛍️ Examples: Laptops, furniture, luxury watches 📅 Why? These require more research. Customers look for warranties, financing options, and comparison videos before buying. 💰 Big-Ticket Investments (₹1,50,000+) → BOF: 14-90 days 🛍️ Examples: Cars, premium gadgets, real estate 📅 Why? These are major financial decisions. Customers take months to decide, so BOF retargeting needs to run longer with trust-building content. Lesson for Performance Marketers 🚀 There is no one-size-fits-all approach in BOF retargeting. Every product category has a different buying cycle. If you’re just applying the same 7-14-30 day formula to every business without understanding the logic, you’re leaving money on the table. Next time you set up a BOF campaign, ask yourself: 1️⃣ How expensive is the product? 2️⃣ How long does the customer take to decide? 3️⃣ What objections do they need help with? If you get this right, your retargeting ads will convert better and your clients will notice the difference. #PerformanceMarketing #MetaAds #D2C #Retargeting #MarketingStrategy #HonestMarketing #bottomfunnel #digitalmarketing

When I was CRO of a $200M SaaS, doing POCs almost destroyed us—months wasted, team exhausted, buyers constantly delaying. Until my VP Sales said, “Kill the POC. We’ll validate value clearly in 3 hours flat”. Here's exactly how we rebuilt our sales process and cut our sales cycle by 50%: BACKGROUND: We were selling 100% enterprise. POCs were the automatic default: Heavy, technical validation lasting 1-3 months. It was painful… - Sales Engineers were overloaded - Buyers kept delaying due to resource issues - Buyers kept wanting more “just one more test” Initially, I thought: It’s Enterprise, that’s the game right? Until our VP Sales, Idan Arealy, joined. Two weeks in, he tells me: “No offense—but these POCs are total overkill.” “Buyers don’t need these endless tests.” “They’re not doubting the tech.” “They’re doubting the value.” “And we don’t need this complexity to prove value.” So he suggested a simpler, smarter alternative: The 'Use Case Workshop'—and it changed everything. Here’s the step-by-step: —— 1. Kickoff (45 min) - AE positions the workshop immediately post-demo: “Here’s what we typically do next to help validate real-world scenarios in just hours—no heavy lift needed. Shall we set it up?" - SE runs deeper disco into problem root causes in a kickoff call - AE sets clear Mutual Action Plan (MAP) 2. Internal Alignment (60 min) - SE & AE clearly define and build initial use-case solutions - Output: Slides outlining impactful solutions & open questions 3. Use Case Co-Design (45 min) - Live session with buyers walking through scenarios - Collaboratively refine solutions LIVE (e.g. Miro, slides): “Walk me through this problem in more detail—we’ll map exactly how solving it looks." 4. Prioritization & Wrap Up (30 min) - Jointly prioritize top 3 impactful use cases clearly: "Which scenarios, solved, would immediately solve [Problem]?" - Lock down committed next steps ↳ Result? - 3 focused hours (instead of months) - Clear, confident buyers ready to champion - 100% faster sales cycles & higher win rates —— POCs are NOT mandatory. Buyers don't want endless tests. Don’t default to what most buyers ask. Design what will solve what they need— With as little friction as possible. That's: Sales Process Design 101. P.S. We built Aligned to help manage the chaos of Complex Sales. 100% FREE Deal Room used by 40K AEs to run POCs, MAPs, etc. Try it https://lnkd.in/d_49kHZE

We used programmatic advertising to turn $5.8K ad spend into $19.5K in revenue with a 3.36x ROAS for an 8-fig DTC brand WITHOUT website traffic retargeting. Here’s how: THE CHALLENGE: CTV ads are great for awareness but tough to track. Unlike Meta or Google, CTV doesn’t have a traditional attribution path. It's an incredible tool for generating awareness and intent, but tough to generate direct performance from without the right strategy. This is where most brands miss the mark - they stop at top-of-funnel awareness and never close the loop. THE SOLUTION: Instead of treating CTV as a standalone play, we used it to fill the top of the funnel… ...then retargeting those engaged viewers through programmatic ads across the open web. STEP 1️⃣: Ran CTV ads to build awareness and get initial audience engagement. STEP 2️⃣: Retargeted those viewers in the middle of the funnel using display & native ads, as well as retargeting through CTV again. STEP 3️⃣: Removed all bottom of funnel retargeting as to get a clear view of CTV performance without cannibalizing other ad channels' traffic. THE IMMEDIATE RESULTS: 👉$5.8K ad spend → $19.5K revenue 👉>90 purchase conversions 👉3.36x Holistic ROAS across all campaigns over a 7 day period Why This Works: 👉 CTV builds brand awareness, but without retargeting, it’s incomplete because it's hard to actually purchase through this channel - ie., it's impossible to 'click' on your TV. 👉 Retargeting those engaged users across the open web moves them further down the funnel, and allows us to be exposed to the CTV traffic in a format that can be engaged with and tracked & attributed. 👉 Retargeting CTV engaged users through CTV again increases brand awareness and recall, thereby increasing purchase intent through the same channel of original exposure. The takeaway? CTV isn’t just a top-of-funnel play. When combined with programmatic retargeting, it’s a conversion machine. You reach massive new audiences that don't exist on other platforms, and convert them across the entire web, not just social platforms. Programmatic is here to expand your marketing funnel, as well as your revenue.

Why most advertising fails to change behaviour I spent 10 years working with the UK Government trying to change behaviour with advertising. Here's what I learnt: 1. Actions drive attitudes, not the other way around We assume action follows attitude. We run campaigns to "boost consideration" or "change perceptions." That often doesn't work. After years of health-related quit smoking campaigns, we found that making the first step easier —like creating moments when everyone was quitting or providing helpful tools, was far more effective than trying to change attitudes. Important watch out for marketers, brand consideration is often a reflection of penetration. A result of action, not a cause of it. 2. Their attitude isn’t the problem We once ran an ethnographic study into why people didn’t exercise more. In multiple homes, we found exercise bikes being used to dry clothes and fitness DVDs still in their packaging. These people wanted to be fit. Their attitude wasn’t the problem. It was the attitudes of others that mattered more. “If I jog around the estate, people will laugh at me.”  What others think is key. 3. Fun + Friends beat Facts + Figures It's tempting to think that if we just make people aware of the facts, they'll change their behaviour. Nonsense. We consistently found that fun is more powerful than facts, and friends more persuasive than figures, however robust. Instead of telling people to read nutritional labels we created apps that made it fun and sociable to do. 4. Unintended consequences are inevitable We’re obsessed with measuring what our campaigns do to people. But we found a bigger focus should be what people do to advertising. Campaigns about negative behaviour can normalise that behaviour. "Everyone does it, why shouldn’t I?". Commercial example: brand misattribution — if you're not careful, your ad benefits your biggest competitor, we see this frequently. 5. Messenger before message Running campaigns as the Government wasn’t often effective. Other voices did a better job — whether creating new brands or bringing together a coalition of the concerned. PR and partnerships were central to everything we did, with advertising supporting them, rather than the other way round. How would your plan look if you made that flip? 6. You are not your audience I once talked to a Mum who gave her children lemonade because it was “one of their 5-a-day”. However much you think you understand your audience, you don't. All the data, models and trackers never came close to the insights possible from spending time with people in their own environment. Every ethnographic debrief made me think differently, tracking debriefs rarely did. All the above learnt from the oracle Sheila Mitchell CBE and her brilliant team — Jo Arden, Stuart Bowden, Stuart Sullivan-Martin, Jane Asscher, Tom Firth, Kate Waters, Nick Hirst, Susanna Cousins, Chetan Murthy, James Hankins, Matt Bell, Ben Aves, + the entire MEC crew. What a team. Much missed! 🙏

From THR: The changes, put together, serve to make the ad-supported tiers more appealing to consumers. Even in the cases where ad tiers’ prices rose, the bigger hikes at their ad-free counterparts are meant to make the cheaper option look like an even better deal. “Streaming is the future of content access, and platforms are trying to create a clearer choice for consumers with their ad-supported and ad-free offerings,” says Julie Clark, senior vp at TransUnion’s #media and #entertainment vertical. “Economic pressures make it impossible for consumers to subscribe to multiple platforms, and #streaming platforms understand the value exchange of advertising with quality content is a logical next step.” Even before the pricing changes, the ad tiers were having an impact. Iger said that 40 percent of new Disney+ subs were choosing the ad tier. A Netflix source, meanwhile, says that its ad-supported user base has doubled since the first quarter and now has more than 10 million active users, up from the 5 million it announced at its upfront in May. So why push users to a less expensive subscription tier? Because they are actually more lucrative. Executives at every streaming giant with both an ad-supported and an ad-free tier (including The Walt Disney Company, Netflix, #Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal) say that total revenue per user is higher on the ad-supported plan than it is on the ad-free plan. And that is the key point: With better margins on the ad-supported plan and the streaming ad business still on the rise, the companies now find themselves incentivized to push subscribers to the ad tiers, be they new subs, existing subs, or those caught in password-sharing crackdowns. According to an Aug. 1 report from Hub Entertainment Research, some 60 percent of respondents said they would choose to watch content on an ad-supported platform rather than ad-free platform, if it saved them $4 to $5 per month or more. A plurality of respondents also said they valued services that had tiered options, letting them choose whether they could get an ad-free or ad-supported tier. The research suggests that having multiple tiers, including a lower-cost ad-supported option, is the smart play. And the streaming companies believe there is room to grow. In a #TV upfront market besieged by a difficult #advertising environment, companies reported only two bright spots: streaming advertising and live #sports. Disney reported that “more than 40 percent of the total upfront dollars committed this year” were for its streaming properties Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+. Paramount reported that its digital video ad business had doubled from 2020, and NBCUniversal said commitments to Peacock were up 30 percent from last year.

"We think we choose brands. Neuromarketing says the brand chooses us." In our class, we were taught that Neuromarketing by definition is the science of consumer behavior. But our professor stopped us right there, because that's not quite it. It is the science of the human mind. Here's what I mean: In the 1970s, Pepsi ran a blind taste test, famously known as the Pepsi Challenge. Strangers on the street were handed two cups. No logos. No labels. Just the drink. Pepsi won. Overwhelmingly. So by every rational measure Pepsi should have crushed Coke, right? Rightttttt? It didn't. Coca Cola still dominates. In the early 2000s, Neuroscientist Read Montague ran the same experiment but this time, inside an fMRI scanner, watching the brain in real time. Another blind test. Pepsi won again. The brain's reward centers lit up brighter for Pepsi. But the moment the participants KNEW they were drinking Coke? Everything changed. The medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for memory, self-identity, and emotion, FIRED UP intensly. The brain wasn't just tasting a drink anymore. It was feeling a story, an emotion. Decades of red cans, polar bear commercials, holiday nostalgia, and "Open Happiness" had literally rewired how people's brains responded to Coca-Cola. Coke had built a neurological shortcut straight to emotion and memory. This is NeuroMarketing at it's core: - Consumers don't make all rational decisions. - The brain processes emotion FASTER than logic. - Correct brand storytelling does have the power to physically change how the brain responds. The Cola Wars were never really about the drink. They were about which brand could own more real estate in the human brain. And Coke has already won that war. Probably not in the market a 100% but definitely in our brains. I myself am a Coke person and frown when I have to settle for Pepsi sometimes. I am so incredibly excited to be diving deep into this field through my Neuromarketing course. I feel like I am learning the secret language behind every buying decision ever made and we are just getting started! Cannot wait to see where this journey takes me. Infinitely grateful to Professor Jennifer T. whose passion for this subject is truly contagious and I am excited to be learning with her again this Spring Quarter. #NeuroMarketing #Consumer #BrandStrategy #Marketing #Psychology #ColaWars #EmotionalMarketing

Your free POC is quietly killing your best deals. I’ve seen too many 7-figure opportunities die in pilot purgatory—not because the product failed, but because the seller hesitated to ask for real commitment upfront. Here’s what executive buyers are really saying when they ask for a free POC: “We’d like you to take all the risk while we decide if we might pay you later.” That’s not a partnership. That’s deferral dressed up as due diligence. There are only two times a POC should be free: 1. Testing a beta feature that needs real-world validation 2. Exploring a completely new use case that’s never been done Even then, get a signed commitment for a press release or case study in return. Free access for them should mean visibility and positioning for you. Now, when they ask for a POC, here's what you do: Don't call it that. Call it what it really is: A “strategic bridge investment.” This isn’t a trial—it’s the first phase of their transformation. The structure is simple: • Fixed scope with clear success metrics • A contractual trigger: full rollout signed by a specific date • Investment counts as credit toward the larger deal • No follow-through? They still pay full price Why this approach works better than traditional POCs: • It eliminates pilot purgatory • It creates shared timelines and alignment • It shifts the frame from transaction to transformation • It positions you as a strategic guide—not a vendor auditioning The mindset shift is everything: Start big. Stay big. Lead with the full vision of what’s possible. Then show them what they risk losing when they force you to think small. Real talk: Most sellers avoid this approach because they think it's "too aggressive." But here’s what I learned: This is how you stop shrinking 7-figure potential into 5-figure tests and start landing transformational enterprise partnerships that build lasting, compounding value. Curious to hear from others: What’s the biggest POC trap you’ve witnessed? Let's learn from our collective experience. 🐝

Here’s a reality check for retailers, customer reviews aren’t just nice-to-haves anymore. They’re your secret weapon. Remember when reviews were just star ratings, often ignored or worse, faked? If you told retailers five years ago that these little snippets would become their most trusted sales drivers, they might have smiled politely and moved on. But fast forward to today, reviews are the authentic currency of trust. Real customers, sharing real experiences. And it’s not just plain text anymore. Reviews have seriously leveled up. Now we’ve got video reviews, photos, unboxing clips, all that raw, real stuff customers post themselves. That’s the real game-changer. When someone can see the product in action or hear a customer’s voice, it cuts through all the noise. It makes the experience so much more relatable, and honestly, way more convincing. Let's be honest, it’s not enough to just collect positive reviews. The real skill, the one that separates great retailers from the rest is how you respond to negative feedback, especially when it’s out in the open. It’s tempting to ignore complaints or delete bad reviews. But addressing them publicly is an art. And I feel everyone should learn that. When done well, it shows customers you listen, you care, and you’re committed to getting better. And the returns will be quite huge. A public, thoughtful response can turn a frustrated buyer into a loyal advocate and send a powerful message to everyone watching. When shoppers see honest, detailed reviews — especially with photos or videos — it helps them feel confident about what they’re buying. It reduces hesitation, answers unasked questions, and creates that “I gotta have this” vibe. And the more reviews you have — good and bad — handled well, the more new customers you’ll attract. I’ve seen retailers lose customers by brushing off bad reviews, and I’ve seen others gain lifelong fans by owning mistakes openly. Trust isn’t built when everything’s perfect. It’s built when you’re honest, transparent, and responsive. So next time you get a negative review, don’t shy away. See it as a chance to build trust, not just fix a problem. Because in the world of retail, trust is the currency that moves the needle. What’s the best or worst way you’ve seen a retailer handle a customer review, did it make you a fan or a no-go? #retail #startups #reviews #marketing