Brij

It’s pretty hard to be intellectually honest in leadership (or just in life), because we are under pressure to know a lot of information (business, politics, culture), and have an opinion on it.

Not to mention the polarizing environment of the current time period.

It’s harder than ever to be intellectually honest.

Here 5 ways to be intellectually honest:

1️⃣ Learn How to Recognize and Admit When You Don’t Know
2️⃣ Withhold Judgment for a While
3️⃣ Don’t be Afraid to Change Your Mind
4️⃣ Give Credit Where Credit is Due
5️⃣ Stay humble

It’s not always easy, but practicing intellectual honesty, will not only help you grow as an individual, but also help you lead your team, company, or family.

The secret to failure is failing early, often, fast, and small

When most people fail, they are embarrassed and want to sweep it under the rug.

Consequently, people avoid failure and risk-taking.

As a founder, I’ve realized that embracing failure is mission-critical.

Because it is the only way to learn and grow.

It’s only an actual failure if you don’t learn anything from the experiment or experience.

But the key is to fail in a controlled way.

Fail early, often, and fast.

Declaring and accepting failure is not always easy.

It requires intellectual honesty to spot when things are not working.

Many small experimental failures help you avoid a catastrophic enterprise failure and get incrementally better.

And sometimes, those small failures can lead to big wins.

Below is a picture of Brij's first iteration.

That product was called Found, and it failed.

That failure led to Brij, which is thriving.

What’s your take on failure?

Retail stores are the new media frontier for brands

There has been a retain media boom in the last few years, with almost all major brands selling digital ads for their online presence.

But now retailers are starting to explore ad space inside their brick-and-mortar locations with digital screens.

According to Andrew Lipsman from Insider Intelligence, in-store audiences are 70% larger than digital audiences.

Walmart’s monthly reach is 213M in-person shoppers vs. 145M online.

For Kroger, in-person reach is 98M in-store shoppers vs. 32.4M online.

The audience potential is staggering for most consumer brands.

Lipsman called stores the “next major media channel.”

Awesome reporting from Erin Cabrey of Morning Brew!

But my big takeaway from reading this article is that there is a huge digital opportunity sitting on the shelf that doesn’t require a brand to spend heavily on trade promotions.

By putting a QR code on product packaging, brands can own digital impressions for way cheaper than buying ad units.

Right now, it’s a huge missed opportunity.

Earlier this year, Brij looked at 3,000 brands in Target and Whole Foods, and only 12.6% were using QR codes to create an owned digital communication channel.

With the addition of a Brij experience, brands can
💪 Share content
💪 Collect data
💪 Stimulate reorder

Retail media is awesome but will price most brands out of participation.

Whereas any brand in retail can afford a Brij experience.

Similar to ads, placement, copy, and offer are important, but they are low-hanging fruit for most brands.

8 stats Adobe’s holiday season retail trends dashboard.

I recently learned that Adobe has a holiday dashboard compiling real-time purchase data.

It offers some pretty amazing insights into this year’s consumer spending behaviors and emerging trends.

Here’s what I learned so far, and some charts are included below.

1️⃣ So far, shoppers have spent $109B this holiday season

2️⃣ The peak of spending was Cyber Monday, not Black Friday

3️⃣ We are roughly halfway to the projected sales of $222B (a projected +5% YoY)

4️⃣ BFCM was peak discounting for most types of goods.

7️⃣ Shoppers bought 20% to 40% more items per order on their desktop.

6️⃣ Desktop conversion rates are ~2x mobile conversion rates.

8️⃣ Spending was almost even split by device, with desktop beating mobile by just .14%

There are a bunch of other dashboards with more insights. (link to the dashboard in comments)

Most likely, some of these data points will have changed by the time you check it out.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out at the end of the holiday season.