Latest Posts
The Hidden Cost of AI at Scale and What Marketers Need to Do About It
Across most organizations, there’s a conversation happening amongst marketing leadership that isn’t being talked about enough. It goes…
July 10, 2026
What If We Could Design for Emotion-based Outcomes?
Why the next great marketing advantage may lie in the one variable we’ve never truly measured. For all…
What CX Is Actually Worth — And Why We’re Measuring It Wrong
We’re increasingly asked to justify CX investments not just on “how they feel,” but on what they contribute. Most…
We Know What Customers Cost. We Don’t Know What They’re Worth.
It’s time to start measuring customers the way we measure every other investment. Loyalty programs, incentives, retention offers,…
The Emotional P&L of Flying
Why Airlines Keep Losing Trust – and What That Reveals About Us When we looked at thousands of…
Sentiment Signals: The Next Layer of Intelligence
Beyond performance metrics like accuracy and latency lies a subtler yet more powerful layer: emotional trust. In intelligent…
July 7, 2026
Sales, Marketing & Loyalty Should Buy CX a Pony
I’ve spent a lot of years inside the customer technology industry watching two extraordinarily powerful capabilities develop in…
Passikoff: America at 250 -The Brands That Earned the Flag
Patriotism isn’t just something Americans observe on July 4th, It’s something they live on July 5th, and every day…
CX is Bigger than CX
Takeaways from Verint Engage ’26 The keynote at Verint Engage 2026 told a confident story: AI investment is…
Marketing With Intent: Starting With the Outcome in Mind
Third in a Series: Change What They Feel In the first two articles in this series, we covered…
What Verint’s Keynote Says About Where Enterprise CX AI Is Actually Going
The annual conference keynote is a reliable artifact. Strip away the production value and the carefully sequenced demos,…
Passikoff: Patriotism as Brand Strategy
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, marketers may want to rethink what makes a brand feel patriotic. Brand…
We All Live in Customerland Now
“Nobody gives a sh*t about brands anymore.” A few weeks ago I found myself wondering whether it might…
Brand Keys’ New Segmentation Reveals What “Patriotic” Actually Means to Consumers
25th annual Most Patriotic Brands survey identifies nine distinct paths to patriotic perception – and the rankings don’t…
Passikoff: Real vs Borrowed Brand Patriotism
Authentic American identity matters more than ever. Especially as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary. Patriotism is…
The Next AI Retail Transformation Is Happening Right Now
By Jessica Leitch Over the next decade, retail will leave behind today’s channel-based model and its distinctions between physical…
Marketing With Intent: Starting With the Outcome in Mind
Second in a Series: Change What They Think In the first article in this series, we laid out…
May 29, 2026
Signal, Noise, and the Customer Continuity Problem
Q&A with Michael Hutchison, Customer Operations Principal, eClerx There’s a growing disconnect in customer experience right now that…
What If Your Fastest Growth Lever Is Inclusion
Editor’s note: Global Accessibility Awareness Day is May 21 so this piece is timely. But this conversation opened my eyes…
Passikoff: On Patriotic Brands
This July, as the United States will mark its 250th anniversary, Brand Keys marks the 25th anniversary of…
The Backlash Against Bad Automation Has Begun
There’s a subtle but important shift hiding inside Verint’s newly released State of Customer Experience 2026 report, and I suspect…
What If Better Support Is Your Real Moat?
There’s a phrase that keeps coming up in customer service conversations that I think we need to retire,…
The Mall Hangout Is Back
by Michael Ganci Before smartphones, social feeds and next-day delivery, the mall was more than a shopping destination.…
The Grocery Stack Is Breaking
And therein lies the opportunity. I recently spent time in conversation with Sean Turner, co-founder and CTO of Swiftly, and…
Marketing With Intent: Starting With the Outcome in Mind
First of a Series: The Question Most Marketers Never Ask Ask most marketers what they’re working on and…
April 21, 2026
Jumpmind’s Expansion Hires Reflect the Realities of Retail Tech Growth
What Jumpmind’s EMEA and APAC Leadership Expansion Suggests About the Retail Technology Market Jumpmind’s announcement that it has…
April 21, 2026
In the Current Economic Uncertainty, Small Businesses Are Investing in Marketing
When times get tough, the old playbook says to tighten your belt and cut costs wherever you can.…
April 9, 2026
The Ethical Call of Leadership (Why Burnout Is a System Failure)
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of excerpts from Michael Fisher’s new book, “From Boardrooms…
April 7, 2026
Passikoff: Branding, Without the Illusions
A scoutmaster asked his troop what three things they’d want if they were alone and lost in the…
Why Collaboration Is an Environmental Outcome, Not a Personality Trait
Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of excerpts from Michael Fisher’s leadership book “From Boardrooms…
March 31, 2026
The Five-Step Leadership Sequence That Keeps You From Escalating the Room
Editor’s Note: I’ve known and worked with Michael Fisher for about 6 years now and to say that…
March 24, 2026
From Call Centers to CX Engines: eClerx’s Michael Hutchison on Closing the Expectation Gap with AI
The modern contact center sits at the fault line of customer capitalism. Every day it absorbs the friction…
The Barn Doesn’t Care About Your Title
Editor’s Note: I’ve known and worked with Michael Fisher for about 6 years now and to say that…
March 17, 2026
When AI Starts Designing the Business
Insights on enterprise AI from a recent conversation with Alan Trefler, CEO of Pega In a recent conversation with Alan Trefler,…
Subscriptions Need to Manage Volatility, Not Just Churn
For most of the last decade, subscription strategy was framed as a retention optimization problem. Reduce churn. Increase…
Passikoff: Listening for Silent Loyalty
The English version of “silence is golden” first appeared in an 1831 poem by Thomas Carlyle. Forty years…
How to Avoid “Good Enough” Marketing and the Race to the Bottom it’s Creating
Last fall, I sat down with Mike Giambattista right here at Customerland for a conversation about “The Collapse…
February 26, 2026
Verint–Calabrio and the Consolidation of CX Infrastructure
On the surface, Verint’s decision to move forward under a single corporate name following its transaction with Calabrio…
The Thousand Quiet Saves
Brands rarely implode in public. They erode in private. A confusing bill.A reminder that arrives too late.A chatbot…
Passikoff: What Makes a Successful Product Launch (Hint: It’s Not What You Think)
When it comes to last year’s least successful new product launch, my vote goes to Stoli Group’s (yes, that Stoli!) $150 million bourbon and…
Building a Resilient B2B Career (While AI Rewrites The Rules)
There’s a persistent temptation, when talking about careers in B2B, to frame instability as a personal problem. If…
February 4, 2026
Why Data Privacy Is Now Everyone’s Job
The digital media and ad ecosystem doesn’t work if marketers don’t understand who they’re selling to and what…
February 2, 2026
Stores Aren’t Broken. But the Mental Model Might Be.
This piece is based on a recent conversation with Justine Melman, CMO at Optimum Retailing. What stood out…
Connection and Relevance in the Year Ahead
Each Tuesday on LinkedIn, I post a new entry in my “This, not That” marketing series. They’re bite-size…
January 26, 2026
AI Didn’t Change the CMO Role. It Took Away the Hiding Places.
I keep hearing CMOs talk about AI as if it’s a tooling problem. What platform to adopt. Which…
January 21, 2026
Fan Data Is No Longer the Bottleneck. Trust Is.
Insights from a Customerland Q&A with Derek Slager, CTO & Co-founder, Amperity. For more than a decade, professional sports organizations…
January 19, 2026
Trust, Agents, and the Future of Work
Agentic systems don’t just automate work – they redefine where trust lives. The AI conversation is loud right now…
Passikoff: Measuring REAL Loyalty
Brand Keys measures brands – and how loyal their customers are to them, because loyalty matters. We’ve done…
Precision Selling Starts When Sales Stops Guessing
The newly announced partnership between SugarCRM and Syspro will inevitably be described as “ERP meets CRM” or “sales intelligence powered by AI.”…
January 8, 2026
Infrastructure Is the Strategy
Why Retail’s Next Advantage Won’t Look Like Software Retail has spent years talking about experience – personalization engines,…
