consumer-behavior
(9)
April LaMon Put the Neighborhood in Your Pocket
She entered app development at 50, started with one unusually demanding customer, and built Alosant by treating software as a place where real neighbors meet.
Bridget Westerholz Is Putting Judgment Back Into Marketing
After 25 years across agencies, grocery aisles, and ad tech, Bridget Westerholz has arrived at a plainspoken thesis: more data is useful only when it helps a marketer make a better decision.
Cenk Bulbul
He earned a PhD studying how feelings drive what people buy, then spent twenty years turning that thesis into marketing for YouTube, Walmart, and now a global bank.
David J. Katz
David J. Katz is Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer and self-styled 'Alchemist in Residence' at Randa Apparel & Accessories, one of the world's largest apparel and accessories companies, home to brands like Levi's, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Haggar and Dickies. He blends data, neuroscience, behavioral economics and storytelling to understand and influence consumer behavior across roughly 1,200 employees and more than 20,000 retail touchpoints worldwide. A LinkedIn Top Voice, co-author of the best-selling 'Design for Response,' and a frequent speaker at Shoptalk and NRF, he is a widely cited voice on retail, marketing and the arrival of AI in the store.
Entropik
Entropik is a deep-tech company that builds a unified human insights platform powered by Emotion AI, Behavior AI, and Generative AI. Founded in 2016 in Bangalore, it uses facial coding, eye tracking, and voice AI - backed by 17 global patents - to decode why consumers make decisions, not just what they do. Its flagship products, Decode and Qatalyst, let brands run quantitative, qualitative, media, and shopper research at scale, replacing slow traditional market research with real-time, AI-driven insights used by companies like P&G, Nestle, and JP Morgan.
Native AI
Native AI is a New York-based market intelligence platform that uses generative AI to build 'Digital Twins' - AI-powered proxies of real consumers assembled from reviews, interviews, surveys and other first- and third-party data. Brands, agencies and market research firms use the platform to chat with clones of their target audience, track products and competitors across the web, and forecast consumer reactions in real time, compressing research timelines that once took weeks into minutes. Founded in 2019 by Frank Pica and Sarah Sanders, the company raised a $3.5M seed round in 2023 and says clients have generated over 275 million Digital Twins to date.
Frank Pica
Frank Pica is the CEO and co-founder of Native AI, a New York market-intelligence platform that builds AI-powered digital twins - synthetic consumer personas drawn from billions of real data points - so brands can interrogate their customers in real time instead of waiting weeks for surveys and panels. A repeat operator who helped scale Decide from three people to over a hundred and launched Adyoulike in North America, Pica is betting that consumer research is going through a renaissance, and that generative AI is leading it.
John Gerzema
John Gerzema is the CEO of The Harris Poll, one of the most recognized names in American public opinion and market research. A four-time author and New York Times bestseller, he built a career turning consumer data into early warnings about cultural change, from the post-2008 values shift to the case for traditionally feminine leadership traits. He spent decades inside ad agencies like Fallon and Young & Rubicam before taking the helm of Harris in 2017, where he now turns weekly polling into a running read on the American mood.
Placer.ai
Placer.ai is a location intelligence platform that turns anonymized mobile-device signals into foot-traffic, trade-area, and audience analytics for the physical world. Founded in 2018, it gives retailers, commercial real estate firms, brands, hospitality operators, and government agencies the same kind of click-level visibility that e-commerce takes for granted - but for stores, malls, restaurants, and Main Streets. The company crossed $100M ARR in 2024 and serves thousands of customers.