Value creation, innovative business models, and non-traditional marketing.

November 10, 2026

Sears helped launch an online service in 1984. Amazon didn't exist for another decade.

The service was Prodigy, a joint venture with IBM and CBS. It carried news, weather, email and message boards, and at one point it ranked among the biggest online services in the world. That's the part of the Sears story most people never hear. We tell it as a company that missed the internet. It didn't miss it. It owned a piece of it. This was a company that also started Allstate Insurance and the Discover card. Ideas were never the shortage. Sears also had something Amazon had to build from nothing: customers who already knew how to buy from a stranger through the mail. For nearly a century, its catalog taught millions of Americans how shipping, payment, substitutions and returns worked. It even sold 70,000 to 75,000 houses by mail between 1908 and 1940. That's most of what e-commerce asks of a shopper: trusting a stranger with a big purchase. So Sears had the habit, the brand, the warehouses and a ten-year head start on the technology. Then in 1993 it shut the catalog down. Amazon was incorporated the next year and opened for business in July 1995. Walmart had already passed Sears as the biggest retailer in America back in 1990. Prodigy was a $600 million venture. Amazon finished its first partial year with about $511,000 in sales, run out of a garage in Bellevue. One of them had every advantage and the other had a book and a website. Sears wasn't blind. It saw the future early and paid for part of it. Then it walked away from the one customer behavior that future was built on. If a shift is coming, protect the customer behavior it depends on before you chase the technology.

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November 9, 2026

Someone told you that you're a visual learner or an auditory learner. Teaching to that style is the part with little evidence behind it. In one U.S. survey,…

People do report preferences. The claim that matters is that matching teaching to a style improves results. In 2008, psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork reviewed the evidence in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They counted 71 proposed learning style models. A fair test sorts learners into categories, randomly assigns them to different teaching methods, and gives everyone the same test at the end. If styles matter, each group should do best with the method that matches its style. Few studies used that design, and some contradicted matching. The authors concluded the evidence was insufficient to justify using learning styles in teaching. Say a manager sorts new hires into visual, auditory and hands on learners and builds a separate training track for each. The review studied education, not workplaces, but training is teaching too, and building three tracks costs time and budget. As of that 2008 review, the evidence that teaching to preferences improves learning was not there. Here are 3 things to try instead. They're suggestions, not research findings: - Pick the format by what you're teaching, not by who is learning. Use a diagram for something spatial, a worked example for a procedure, and practice for a skill. - Give everyone the same test at the end, so you can compare training methods. - Ask what people learned, not whether they liked the session. Has anyone ever told you that you're a visual or auditory learner? Did it change how you studied?

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November 8, 2026

Adding a pricing option that nobody picked lifted the bundle from 32% to 84% in an MIT experiment. Researchers then made 91 attempts to produce the same…

Dan Ariely's 2008 book Predictably Irrational popularized the trick. A subscription page offered web only for $59, print only for $125, and print plus web for $125. Nobody should pick print only, since print plus web costs the same. Ariely reported giving the options to 100 MIT students. With all three, 84% chose print plus web, 16% chose web only, and none chose print only. Without the print only option, 68% chose web only and 32% chose print plus web. His explanation: the useless option, the decoy, makes the bundle look better by comparison. Picture a founder who adds a decoy tier because a book said it would lift sales. Three months later revenue is flat, and she blames her copy. In 2014, two papers in the Journal of Marketing Research tested it on more realistic choices. Frederick, Lee and Baskin found the effect largely disappeared, and sometimes the decoy lowered the target's share. Yang and Lynn made the 91 attempts across 23 product categories, and 11 showed a reliable effect, about 12%. Pictures and qualitative descriptions reduced or removed it. Huber, Payne and Puto, the original decoy researchers, did not dispute the findings and called the effect fragile. Students picking from a menu are not customers or prospects spending their own money, so a tactic that works with them may fade or backfire on your pricing page. Test it. Show half your visitors the old page and half the new one, and compare what they buy. Decide your sample size before you start, and do not stop early when the numbers look good. Which pricing tactic did you adopt before you tested it?

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