Latest Posts
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…
The Emotional P&L of Flying
Why Airlines Keep Losing Trust – and What That Reveals About Us When we looked at thousands of…
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
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…
April 16, 2026
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…
April 15, 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,…
What If We Could Design for Emotion?
Why the next great marketing advantage may lie in the one variable we’ve never truly measured. For all…
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,…
The Best of Customerland (So Far)
This year, Customerland crossed a meaningful milestone: 53 published episodes! It’s been a year of massive shifts – AI…
December 29, 2025
Retail at the Speed of Intent
Retail has crossed a quiet but consequential threshold. Real-time decisioning is no longer a differentiator reserved for elite…
In Trust We Calculate – Rebuilding Confidence in the Age of AI
Welcome to the final installment in our series on AI and human behavior. If Parts 1 through 4…
When The Cart Becomes the Channel
Why Smart Carts Mark the End of “Unmeasured” Retail A conversation with Yaniv Zukerman, CMO at Cust2Mate For…
Passikoff: Greetings, Marketers!
Greetings, marketers, both old and newHere’s a 2025 year-end review. The best-known holiday poem is generally considered to…
Unified Commerce, Real Loyalty, Actual Results
A conversation with Eagle Eye’s Jeff Baskin For decades, retail loyalty sat on top of the business like…
December 3, 2025
Fraud, Identity, and the New Economics of Trust
Digital commerce delivered on its promise of speed. What it didn’t deliver – at least not fully –…
November 26, 2025
Passikoff: ‘Tis the (really long) Season
Brands like Coca-Cola and Macy’s helped entrench Santa Claus in popular culture, and Christmas became a retail juggernaut,…
Who Carries the Moral Weight? Accountability in the Age of AI
Welcome to Part 3 of our ongoing series on AI and human behavior. If Part 1 explored the…
November 21, 2025
The Collapse of “Good Enough”
What Andrew Schulkind Shows Us About Strategy, Craft, and the Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter Marketing spent the…
November 19, 2025
The Vibe-Shaped Customer: Micro-Moments, Mood, and the New Consumer Logic
Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed something odd happening in the consumer world. It’s subtle, but…
Cardlytics and the Real Economics of Commerce Media
From a conversation with Amit Gupta, CEO of Cardlytics Commerce media has quietly moved from marketing experiment to…
November 12, 2025
Passikoff: A Brand That Doesn’t Need Gimmicks
Tomorrow is Veterans Day – a national celebration honoring the patriotism, courage, and sacrifice of America’s veterans. I…
November 10, 2025
Is Agency Is the New Loyalty?
This has been bugging me for a while. We talk about loyalty as if it were a program…
After Omnichannel – Why Brands Must Redesign for Agentic Customers
In my recent Customerland conversation with Ben Wiener, Managing Partner at Cognizant Moment, one theme kept resurfacing: the ground beneath marketing is…
The Marketing Alternative to Customer Research
We hear a lot of reasons for not doing the kind of customer research you should be doing…
October 30, 2025
CX at Its Core: What Technology Can’t Fix
Takeaways from our conversation with Lee Kemp Customer experience has never been louder.New tools, dashboards, frameworks, and acronyms…
Rewriting the Math of CX
My conversation with Ken Lain, Senior Vice President and Head of CX, Customer Service and Operations at Verizon…
