Imagine you and your colleagues gathered an unprecedented amount of information in preparation for a meeting with a prospective client. You know their product preferences and corporate priorities - maybe even what they ate for breakfast. However, when you enter the meeting, suddenly no two people on your team can speak the same language. Closing the deal would be nearly impossible.

For a country founded on religious freedom, mainline Christian denominations face the harsh reality of declining attendance. "Do not attend church or identify with any organized religion" are trending upward among most populations, according to statistics published by The Pew Center.

"All politics is local" was a phrase made famous by the late Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, and today, all marketing is local.

Easter is April 1 and that's no April Fool's joke. Americans will buy an estimated $18 billion in Easter basket items, a number that will meet last year's record spend, according to the National Retail Federation. Much of that purchasing power is controlled by mothers. A recent survey we undertook uncovers moms' spending habits around Easter and how brands can capture their Easter dollars. Overall, Moms find it fun to create Easter baskets and anticipate buying enough toys, clothes, books and food to fill an average of five baskets per household this year.

You've probably never heard of Taobao. It's not a popular household brand in the United States, unlike its main competitor, Amazon. Taobao is the consumer face of retail giant Alibaba Group, which has been slowly invading Amazon's market share from across the Pacific in China.

When I travel, I pack extra empathy so I'll experience all my encounters not as a hospitality professional, but as an ordinary guest. I believe this mindset is crucial to building a world-class product where guests know your priority is them.

Blasted with a constant firehose of information every single day, consumers are trying to filter the noise more efficiently than ever. If you know anything about System 1 thinking, you know just how automatic it is for the brain to tune out what's irrelevant.

On a recent episode of "Reply All," a podcast about the internet, host PJ Vogt shared an experience that had him convinced Facebook was using his phone's microphone to spy on him: "I was, you know, making pizza dough, and I said, 'This would be a lot easier if we had one of those fancy KitchenAid mixers.' Ten minutes later, there's an ad for KitchenAid mixers on sale."