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A new tool allows users to create multimodal digital surrogates that operate across messaging apps, scaling their presence and acting as a mirror.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
A new brand wants to change how people interact with honey by addressing two persistent frustrations: the sticky jar and the gloopy drip. Honey Department's honey comes in a squeezable, infinitely recyclable aluminum tube, replacing the traditional glass jar or plastic container with packaging borrowed from the toothpaste aisle. The honey itself has been transformed through a "controlled micro-crystallization process" that creates a smooth, spreadable texture thick enough to hold its shape on toast without running or dripping, yet creamy enough to squeeze from the tube.Founded by Noah Phillips, son of a beekeeper, the product starts with 100% raw wildflower and mesquite honey sourced from a co-op in Central Mexico. The liquid honey undergoes processing at a family-owned Texas apiary, where it's transformed into what the industry calls creamed honey. By controlling crystallization to form microscopic, uniform crystals, the texture stays stable and won't turn grainy or harden. Tubes are priced at USD 15 for 6 oz (170 g).TREND BITEHoney Department illustrates how traditional food categories can be overhauled through format innovation rather than flavor novelty. The insight here isn't about honey itself it's about everyday points of micro-friction. Jars require utensils, while plastic squeeze containers don't work with thick, creamy honey. And both can get messy. Tubes eliminate those snags. Making the tubes aluminum instead of plastic taps into another consumer expectation: packaging that feels both premium and environmentally considered.For brands in mature categories, the opportunity lies in reimagining the physical experience of using a product rather than just reformulating what's inside. Format shifts can unlock new consumption occasions (desk lunches, after-workout snacks, anywhere and usage contexts that ingredient tweaks never could.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Secret Life Of Dads hosted a braiding workshop for fathers at a London pub, and tapped into something bigger than hair.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Blizzard Entertainment has finally launched player housing in World of Warcraft (a feature its community had been requesting for decades), and Zillow is jumping in with a playful crossover. Zillow for Warcraft is a custom microsite that lets anyone browse a curated collection of in-game homes from the fantasy realm of Azeroth, complete with 3D tours and aerial-style visuals modeled on Zillow's real-world tools. Listings range from Stormwind townhouses to Horde-influenced bungalows, and the site will continue adding player-created homes over time.For Blizzard, the partnership lends its new housing feature cultural legitimacy beyond the gaming bubble. For Zillow, it's an entry point into one of the most loyal digital communities on earth, arriving at the precise moment players are most excited about making a space their own. The meaning transfer runs both ways: World of Warcraft channels its fandom's creative energy toward Zillow, while Zillow confers "home legitimacy" on virtual housing. If Zillow becomes synonymous with envisioning your future home whether that home is suburban, urban, or virtual the brand equity compounds across realities.TREND BITEAs the boundaries between physical and digital worlds dissolve, people are increasingly eager to play at the seams, exploring moments where the real and the imagined overlap. This collaboration works because it invites exactly that kind of play: browsing fantasy homes with real-world tools, treating a digital realm with the same aspirational energy usually reserved for Sunday afternoon Zillow scrolling. The takeaway for other brands? Don't just parachute into fantasy spaces. Instead, consider crafting singular moments that have one foot in the real and one in the constructed experiences that feel native to both worlds and forced in neither.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
The average smartphone lasts about two years before it's replaced. Vignette Tech wants to flip the script on how people feel about holding onto their devices. The concept is simple: colorful stickers that users stick on the back of their phones, tablets or laptops one for each year of use. Instead of looking outdated, a phone sporting stickers reading '22, '23, '24 and '25 signals longevity. Anyone who's driven through Switzerland will recognize the inspiration: the colorful annual toll stickers that accumulate on car windshields year after year. Vignette Tech transplants that familiar visual logic onto personal electronics.The stickers are sold in sets covering different time ranges, with the latest edition running from 2026 through 2031, and are priced at EUR 4 or 5 per sheet. There's even a "Highlander" edition, for those rocking phones or laptops from the mid-2010s. Sales proceeds from the initiative, created by French design agency Machin Bidule, also support La Collecte Tech and Emmaüs Connect, organizations working on digital inclusion and electronic waste reduction in France.TREND BITEWith manufacturers like Google and Samsung now offering seven-plus years of software support, the technical case for holding on to a phone has never been stronger but the pressure to upgrade remains relentless. Vignette Tech is interesting because it addresses the problem at an identity level rather than at a guilt level. Instead of lecturing people about e-waste, it makes longevity a flex. That cultural reframing aligns with a broader pattern worth replicating: brands and creators finding ways to make sustainable behavior socially desirable rather than morally obligatory.
Category:
Marketing and Advertising