I was in my freshman year of college and the “Introduction To Sociology” class assignment was to work with a partner and watch a movie from a set list of films with relevant sociological themes, then write a paper about it. Most of the films on the list were older and would require us to ...

Homeowner’s insurance is not an incredibly exciting topic. Many homeowners pay the bill through their mortgage payment, so your interactions with the insurance company providing the product are typically minimal. It’s the epitome of what we in the marketing profession call a low-involvement category. You have to have it, you have to choose a company ...

How We Got Here It was on Palm Lane when the anxiety really got elevated. I often took the side streets, like Palm, to get to the agency’s new office location on Central Avenue in the Phoenix midtown business district. One might think it was to avoid the traffic. A more honest introspection would reveal ...

Even as someone who has worked in the marketing field for many years, I frequently have to laugh at some of the shenanigans we pull as an industry, especially in advertising. All too often, marketing executives are falling all over themselves to portray their product in its absolute best light, almost to a fault. Look ...

I had never met anyone who had gone to Monmouth University. I had never met anyone who had been an on-air deejay for a rock station on the Jersey Shore. I had never met anyone who knew how to both play guitar and work a lathe. I had never met anyone who had a hedgehog ...

With the holidays around the corner, a story from earlier this year keeps resurfacing in my mind. Remember the 8-year-old Ohio girl who made headlines for driving her family’s car to Target with $400 in cash? As a mom of a teen and tween, I wasn’t as shocked as most people seemed to be—especially with ...

Grocery chains aren’t typically found at the summit of memorable brand marketing. Many are beholden to a playbook that seems like a throwback to another era. The essential tools seem to be co-op dollars, weekly specials and I-never-asked-for-this-but-here-it-is-in-my-mailbox circulars. Because we haven’t received a newspaper in well over a decade, these circulars do come in ...

  If you have kids in youth sports or have friends who have had kids in youth sports, you’ve seen all the YouTube videos or Instagram posts or even national news coverage about coaches. There’s the coach with the mouth that would make a sailor uncomfortable. The coach with the attitude. The coach desperately reliving ...

In all of my 13 years, I’d probably never heard the word “degenerates” used as a label or insult. It was one of several epithets he liked to employ quite regularly. To change it up, his repertoire also included wilting appellations such as “loser” and “weakling” but degenerates seemed to be his favorite. Luckily, these ...

When you decide that it would be fun to launch a brand for a coworking space called Mixtape that you’ll also have as the base of operations for your marketing agency, there are a ton of things that you don’t think about needing to handle. The HVAC air filters need to be changed. So do ...

Sports, art, cooking, animals, gaming, leadership, church, comedy, academics, coding, theater, STEM…it seems like there is a summer camp for everything these days. Mostly in-person, with several online choices as well – youth summer camp programs can be half day, full day, or overnight – with price tags to match. The average cost of summer ...

I wrote recently about being a fan of Bruce Springsteen for essentially nearly all of my years on the planet given that I started pretty young.  Here’s a list of five songs that I feel don’t get enough credit. Tougher Than The Rest. I first heard this song by a country artist I like named ...

I was in the very back of a 1976 light blue V8 Ford station wagon. My family was either crisscrossing the country during one of my Dad’s many military assignments or maybe visiting relatives in Tucson by way of Michigan. I was probably around nine or ten. I had a Walkman and my sister Laura’s ...

Recently, I was fortunate to attend my first The Market Research Event (TMRE) conference in Denver. For those unfamiliar, TMRE is an annual conference that serves as a gathering point for hundreds of insight leaders eager to network, discover the latest innovations and tools in the industry, and find inspiration. It’s basically Disneyland for us ...

Part of our job at Nucleus is to understand not only a target audience’s perceptions and beliefs but also sometimes even their cultures and customs. In that light, I thought we’d share some fun gift-giving traditions and customs from around the world. But first, some quick history. It turns out gifting has been a practice ...

Whether it is locally, nationally or internationally, it seems like the volume knob of life is stuck at “11” no matter where you turn.  Business is no different, where insights are needed now more than ever.  But, despite the need, the industry is faced with some unique challenges; as such, we need to evolve too.  ...

More so than many other nations around the globe, Americans have options. From restaurants to shoes to tire shops and everything in between, brands compete for our business. Increasingly, so do schools. With an eighth grader on the precipice of high school, I recently witnessed this first-hand as we “shopped” three possibilities for where he ...

In marketing, researchers are often seen as number crunchers, invariably tied to spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Upon joining the team here at Nucleus, that assumption was quickly corrected. Speaking from my perspective, the commonality that the Nucleus team and I share is inquisitiveness and a genuine interest in learning about a broad range of topics ...

So, I was one of those people who didn’t know what they wanted to do when they grew up. At one time, I wanted to join the Marines. Later, I thought I would enter a seminary. Neither of those things happened. When I got to college, I must have explored nearly a dozen majors—English, Political ...