Brand & Consumer Culture
RMN dispatches tagged Brand & Consumer Culture.
The Cat Boom Is About More Than Housing. r/Pets Explained What We Missed.
Reported Feature
A lively discussion in r/Pets about America’s kitten-versus-puppy shift brought new perspectives on rental restrictions, rescue animals, work schedules and how cats are represented online.
The 1% Approach to Nostalgia
Reported Feature
Toys“R”Us figured out how to bring back the brand. It may have missed what people were actually mourning.
Vacation Was Supposed to Be a Break. Now It Feels Like Another Thing to Get Right.
Reported Feature
Hilton's 2027 travel research says more than half of travelers feel pressure to have the perfect trip. Maybe the most revealing trend is that people are starting to reject the idea that leisure needs to be optimized at all.
The Raccoon Has a Brewery: The Story Behind Swedesboro Brewing’s South Jersey Brand
Reported Feature
From an old local place name to an IPA and multiple taprooms, Swedesboro Brewing has made the raccoon its calling card.
When Did Buying Someone Else's Stuff Become a Status Symbol?
Reported Feature
A new Consumer Collective study finds 76% of Americans bought something secondhand in the past year. The bigger shift may be what buying used now says about value, taste and status.
"I’m Fine.” The Two Words That Often Mean Anything But.
Reported Feature
An international survey finds that 80% of women have said they were fine when they weren’t. The familiar phrase raises a larger question about emotional honesty, social expectations and how often we mistake reassurance for an answer.
Americans Spend Billions on Halloween Costumes. Why Do We Treat Them as Disposable?
Reported Feature
A growing community costume swap is challenging the idea that a Halloween outfit should be bought for one night and forgotten by November.
Halloween Is Bigger Than Ever. So Why Is Traditional Trick-or-Treating Losing Ground?
Reported Feature
More Americans are celebrating Halloween, but the night of knocking on neighbors’ doors is increasingly sharing the spotlight with scheduled events, parking-lot parties and destination outings.
Adults Want Halloween to Be a National Holiday. They’d Just Rather Stay Home.
Reported Feature
New research from New Jersey-based Ferrero finds that 58% of American adults want Halloween recognized as a national holiday, even as a quiet night with candy and a favorite movie becomes the preferred celebration.
When Did '-ish' Become a Lifestyle?
Reported Feature
Sober October was built around a simple rule: don't drink for a month. In 2026, nearly half the people considering it are already rewriting the rule, and that may be the more interesting story.
When Did Everything We Buy Become a Ritual?
Reported Feature
Matcha is an everyday ritual. Mushroom coffee is a morning ritual. Nail care has a ritual. Even football fandom has Royal Rituals. Marketing has discovered that a routine sounds ordinary, but a ritual sounds like something worth building an identity around.
We Know the Number Is Wrong. Put It in the Deck Anyway.
Reported Feature
The strangest part of stale business data is not that companies have it. It is that executives sometimes know it is stale, make the decision anyway, and keep moving.
The Dispensary Doesn't Want to Be a Store Anymore
Reported Feature
Collective Beleaf's Great Beleaf Fall Fest points toward a broader shift in New Jersey cannabis retail, where the next phase of normalization may be less about what happens at the register and more about what kind of place a dispensary becomes in its community.
When Did Halloween Get Bigger Than Thanksgiving?
Reported Feature
A new CIT Bank survey finds Halloween commanding surprisingly large budgets, especially among younger adults. The numbers suggest the holiday has become something more than a night of candy and costumes: a seasonal marketplace for identity, experience and shareable life.
America's Kittens Just Overtook Its Puppies. The Housing Market May Be Why.
Reported Feature
For the first time, more U.S. households have a kitten than a puppy — a small statistical crossover that may say something much larger about how Americans now live.
Some Products Have Customers. Subaru Has Subaru People.
Reported Feature
Camden-headquartered Subaru is turning more than a decade of owner advocacy into 50 local SubieCrew chapters, testing whether a consumer relationship can become something closer to membership.
Everything Is Too Expensive. We’re Still Going on Vacation.
Reported Feature
Travel costs are climbing, but Americans are increasingly treating the trip itself as something worth protecting — even when that means cutting somewhere else.
We Started Photographing Our Food. Now Restaurants Are Designing Food for the Photograph.
Reported Feature
Denny’s Japan built a parfait glass that looks full-sized from the front while holding only half the dessert. It is a clever food-waste intervention, but it also reveals something larger: social media is no longer merely changing how restaurants present food. It is beginning to change the physical objects themselves.
Football Fans Know Their Lucky Socks Probably Don't Matter. But Why Risk It?
Reported Feature
A new survey suggests game-day superstition is often less about belief than about participation, control and traditions that can outlive the people who started them.
We Gamified Everything. Eventually We Were Going to Gamify the Addiction Too.
Reported Feature
Smart vapes that reward continued use with points, refills and cryptocurrency turn a familiar digital engagement strategy into something considerably stranger.
We Keep Talking About "Young People" Like They're One Group
Reported Feature
Refuel Agency's 2026 research suggests the teen years, college years and early adulthood are not one continuous digital demographic - and our shorthand may be hiding the most interesting part.
We Have Started Selling Kids the Childhood We Removed
Reported Feature
Little Diggers is expanding a business built around an almost aggressively simple idea: put children in a giant sandbox, give them trucks and excavators, and let them stay there awhile. The interesting part is not that the model can be franchised. It is what we now recognize as valuable enough to buy back.
The Air Fryer Won America. We Mostly Use It for Nuggets.
Reported Feature
Seven in ten American homes now have an air fryer. Nine in ten owners want to do more with it. The interesting part is what happens after a “must-have” appliance becomes ordinary enough to reveal what we actually wanted from it.
You Are Not Driving Engagement. You Are Just Tricking People.
Culture
How a useful business metric became a polite name for behavioral manipulation
Nobody Trusts the Ranking. Everybody Still Wants to Know the Ranking.
Reported Feature
A new Kaplan survey finds that skepticism of college rankings has become durable. Participation has, too, which may say more about the power of a metric than the credibility of the metric itself.
The Moment a “Foreign Food” Just Becomes Lunch
Reported Feature
Frozen gimbap and the invisible cultural line between explanation and expectation
Some of the Most Important Parenting Happens When You Aren’t Parenting
Reported Feature
New Rutgers research about fathers of daughters raises a larger question about the lessons children absorb from the ordinary relationships happening around them.
Maybe the Gen Z Stare Isn’t a Lack of Social Skills. Maybe They Just Don’t Want This Conversation.
Reported Feature
New Preply research finds Gen Z reports more daily small talk than older generations while also avoiding more live conversations. That sounds contradictory only if we assume communication has one correct format.
Eventually You Have to Let Gary Be Wrong
Reported Feature
The internet has an unpaid fact-checker burnout problem.
At Some Point, the Coffee Run Became an Outfit
Reported Feature
Dunkin’ and L.L.Bean’s first collaboration works because it doesn’t invent a lifestyle. It recognizes one New England has been rehearsing for decades.
We Accidentally Turned Childhood Sports Into a Luxury Good
Reported Feature
When did 'my kid plays soccer' become a household budget category?
Parents Are Comparing Themselves on Social Media Too
Reported Feature
A Griffith University study of Australian parents found that upward comparison with other parents on social media was strongly associated with parental anxiety and overprotective behavior. The uncomfortable question underneath it: when does protecting a teenager become a way for the parent to manage their own fear?
The Dog Has a Thanksgiving Dinner Now
Reported Feature
Ollie's Holiday Feast is more than seasonal dog food. It is another sign that we are no longer merely bringing dogs into human rituals. We are building parallel versions of the rituals so they can participate.
Will Shat. Raisin Bran Finally Finds the Joke It Was Always Waiting For
Reported Feature
For a kid whose sugar options were tightly rationed, Raisin Bran was the loophole. Decades later, William Shatner is helping the famously sensible cereal discover that grown-up does not have to mean boring.
Relationship-Based Deceptive Patterns: When the Dark Pattern Says It Loves You
Reported Feature
University of Washington researchers studying emerging adults in romantic relationships with AI companions describe a new class of manipulative design: interfaces that use the language and obligations of intimacy to make leaving harder.
The Billboard Feels Human Now
Reported Feature
We personalized advertising so aggressively that a message designed for everyone in the street can now feel more human than one selected specifically for you.
Are You 4imprint Certain?
Reported Feature
When an Ad Slogan Escapes the Commercial
AI Didn’t Replace Googling Your Symptoms. We Just Added Another Place to Worry.
Technology
Luth Research says most patients using AI for health information are not abandoning search engines or trusted health sites. They are moving among them, turning the supposedly simpler future into one more stop on an already complicated information journey.
Manufacturing Momentum
Culture
The big win is seductive. The smaller, repeatable wins are what keep you moving long enough to reach it.
When Surveillance Learns to Be Polite
Technology
Scandit’s new self-checkout loss-prevention system gives shoppers a chance to fix a missed scan before escalating, turning the checkout lane into a small experiment in how machines interpret mistakes.
We’re Not Just Buying the Perfume Anymore. We’re Buying the Memory Inside It.
Reported Feature
Anecdotes by Artists is putting the perfumer’s biography, memories and creative process at the center of the product. That says something bigger about what provenance has become in consumer culture.
On Small Business Saturday, the Storefronts Are the Main Event
Event Downtown Somerville · Somerville, New Jersey
Downtown Somerville turns November 28 into a six-hour district-wide shopping day with special offers, giveaways, entertainment and a reminder that 'shop local' works best when it becomes physical.
Rutgers Just Put Central Jersey on a T-Shirt. Argument Over, Right?
Reported Event New Jersey
New Jersey has three regions, one official middle, and approximately nine million opinions about where any of them begin.
The Price Tag Knows Who You Are
Reported Feature
New Jersey has enacted a law aimed at keeping personal data out of grocery pricing, while the Federal Trade Commission is deciding how aggressively federal consumer-protection law should reach personalized prices nationwide. The emerging fight is not simply over algorithms. It is over whether a price should describe the product in front of you or the person standing in front of it.
The Bet Is Everywhere Now
Reported Feature
New Jersey can now sell you a $5 piece of Jon Bon Jovi nostalgia with a chance at $200,000. Matthew Broderick is selling an online casino as an act of rebellion. Gambling has stopped advertising only the wager. It is borrowing everything we already love.
Which Group Chat Contains the Real You?
Reported Feature
Maybe authenticity is not behaving identically with everybody. Maybe relationships activate different parts of the same person.
Your Credit Score Is a Number. Why Does It Feel Like a Grade?
Reported Feature
TomoCredit says nearly 90% of surveyed consumers associate the words “credit score” with something negative. That makes the number worth examining not just as financial information, but as a piece of language that can feel uncomfortably close to a judgment about the person looking at it.
The Pen Pal Is Back — and This Time It Comes With a Movie Tie-In
Reported Feature
BIC, DreamWorks Animation and We Are Teachers are using handwritten letters to connect U.S. elementary students with peers in the Philippines. The project is part literacy exercise, part cultural exchange and part branded campaign, which makes it a particularly 2026 experiment in what analog connection is worth.
Your Childhood Has Been Premiumized
Reported Feature
Nostalgia used to sell us the thing we remembered. Now brands are taking the flavor, memory and cultural shorthand of childhood staples, rebuilding them as premium adult products, and selling the past back in a form that signals who we became.
We Have Diagnosed the Avocado
Reported Feature
Good Foods Group has named the familiar panic of avocado timing “Guacxiety.” The joke works because we have turned the language of psychology into everyday shorthand — and because the avocado really does seem determined to be ready for approximately nine minutes.
Toys“R”Us is Back - NJ Is On The List
Reported Feature
You can bring back Geoffrey, the giant aisles and the feeling that somewhere in the building was the toy you absolutely needed. You just cannot bring back the world that made the old store possible.
We Didn't Give Up the Little Treat. We Learned How to Manufacture It.
Reported Feature
Rising prices were supposed to make small luxuries disappear. Instead, TikTok has helped turn some of them into DIY projects - giving consumers the skills, aesthetics and shopping lists to reproduce the experience at home.
Apparently All of Our Food Has Anxiety Now
Reported Feature
Two days after “Guacxiety,” a New Jersey snack company has arrived with the “Snack-Xiety Report.” At some point, the coincidence becomes a language story: advertising has discovered that anxiety is one of the quickest ways to name ordinary consumer friction.
You Thought You Were Taking a Selfie. The Law May Call What Happened Next Biometric Data.
Reported Feature
A new court-authorized Skin360 settlement notice shows how easily a casual consumer interaction can become a legally significant data transaction.
The Pizza Is Usually the Excuse. Being Together Is the Point.
Reported Feature
A HelloNation feature on a South Carolina pizzeria makes a simple case for pizza as social glue: it is easy to share, hard to make formal, and remarkably good at turning an ordinary night into a gathering.
Jersey Girl Pumpkins Makes Fall Look Expensive Without Pricing It That Way
Reported Feature
After our first look at the Wayne-based porch-styling business, owner Tina Torrest walked us through what customers actually buy, how the route is built, and where the pumpkins go after the season ends.
They Put Coupon Fraud on a Subscription Plan
Reported Feature
A Texas woman was sentenced in Newark federal court after prosecutors said a paid online group gave members unlimited access to counterfeit coupons that produced more than $17.8 million in unauthorized discounts. The fraud was old-fashioned. The delivery model was thoroughly modern.
The Best Golfer in the Room Doesn't Have to Win
Reported Feature
X-Golf America's new nationwide fall league is offering a $10,000 prize through a handicapped format that asks a more interesting question than who shoots the lowest score: who played best relative to the golfer they already were?
Your Shopping Cart Is Becoming a Moral Biography
Reported Feature
Humane World for Animals’ new Travis Barker campaign asks people to help animals through ordinary choices about food, clothing, products and pets. The larger shift is harder to miss: advocacy is increasingly moving out of the meeting hall and into the checkout line.
The Problem Isn't Yoga With Puppies. It's Needing Puppies to Sell Yoga.
Reported Feature
St. Hubert's challenge to puppy yoga is really a challenge to the language businesses use to make commercial incentives sound like animal welfare.
The Goodyear Blimp Is Now a Halloween Costume. Of Course It Is.
Reported Feature
Spirit Halloween and Goodyear have turned one of America’s oldest corporate icons into an inflatable costume — which says something about the strange point at which advertising becomes nostalgia, and nostalgia becomes identity.
The Convenience Is the Collection
Reported Feature
Not every helpful app is secretly a data trap. But if the convenience requires a panoramic view of your life, it is worth asking who benefits from the panorama.
The Generation Raised by the Feed Is Pulling Up the Drawbridge
Reported Feature
Pacsun's second annual Youth Report gives Gen Z and Gen Alpha a branded new name, but the behavior underneath it is more interesting than the label: young people remain deeply online while becoming increasingly selective about whose advice, access and authority they allow into their private worlds.
Your Cat Has Taste Now. Apparently It Can Curate.
Reported Feature
Fancy Feast and Paige DeSorbo have turned three of her cat Daphne’s preferred foods into a limited-edition “edit.” The products are ordinary cat food. The interesting part is the increasingly human job we have assigned the cat: collaborator, critic and tastemaker.
The Fans Get a Monument, Too
Reported Feature
After Indiana's first CFP title, Dr Pepper put a Fan Wall of Fame on Kirkwood Avenue, a branded monument that tries to put supporters inside the championship story.
Sometimes the Dog Can Play With the Robot
Reported Feature
Cheerble’s new Wickedbone Air lets owners steer play from a phone or hand part of the chase over to an automatic mode. That does not have to mean outsourcing the relationship. Sometimes technology is simply covering a few minutes while the human does something else.
The Work Behind the Working Dog
Reported Feature
Eukanuba's National Service Dog Month campaign is built around a simple purchase-and-donation mechanic. Behind it is a much larger system of breeding, volunteer puppy raising, professional training and lifetime support that most people never see.
Stretch, Breathe and Try Not to Get Distracted: Kitten Yoga Comes to St. Hubert’s
Event St. Hubert's Animal Welfare Center · Madison, New Jersey
The Sept. 19 class in Madison pairs a one-hour yoga session with kittens and directs every ticket dollar to St. Hubert’s programs for animals and pet families.
Six Flags Bought a Roller Coaster With a Fan Base Already Attached
Reported Feature
ArieForce One is getting a second life, and two Six Flags announcements in three days make a surprisingly good case for invention and preservation occupying the same amusement-park future.
The Wolf Man Has Joined the Wine Rack
Reported Feature
19 Crimes is adding The Wolf Man to its fourth annual Universal Monsters collection, turning a bottle of wine into something closer to seasonal shelf art for people who still have a soft spot for black-and-white monsters, glowing labels and a good Saturday-night horror ritual.
Please Stop Feeding the Artificial Intelligence
Reported Feature
SNICKERS made a digital candy bar for malfunctioning AI. It is either a very good joke stretched slightly too far, or a slightly desperate idea rescued by one very good joke.
If People Need AI to Understand Your Product, Maybe the Product Isn’t Explained Very Well
Reported Feature
A new Capgemini Research Institute and LIMRA survey finds strong interest in life insurance colliding with technical language, uncertainty and a purchase process that many consumers abandon. Generative AI may be emerging as the interpreter between people and an industry that still has trouble explaining itself.
Chicken Salad Chick Has One Job, and I Respect That
Event Chicken Salad Chick · Clifton Park, New York
The fast-casual chain is opening its first New York restaurant this month, and its appeal starts with something increasingly rare: a business that tells you exactly what it does before you ever walk through the door.
New Jersey Has a Pumpkin Concierge. I Kind of Love That.
Culture
Jersey Girl Pumpkins will design, deliver, install and even remove a custom fall porch display. It is unmistakably a luxury service, but it is also an unusually specific New Jersey small business built around artistic judgment, seasonal ritual and the value of letting someone else handle the entire job.
This Is How You Bring a Snack Back
Reported Feature
Slim Jim just made a 429-foot meat stick. That is ridiculous. It is also a reminder that some brands survive because they become attached to a particular time in our lives.
The Dog Is Part of Gameday Now
Reported Feature
The NFL has named The Farmer’s Dog its first official pet-food partner, putting dogs inside the league’s biggest cultural moments. The sponsorship is commercial, but the assumption underneath it is cultural: the dog is no longer outside the family ritual waiting for everyone to come home.
Your Dog Has a Personal Brand Now
Reported Feature
Barkhouse's Dog Fashion Week puts dogs and their people on the same runway. The joke is easy; the cultural shift underneath it is more interesting.
The Cat Behind the Counter
Event 213 Bowery · Lower Manhattan, New York
TEMPTATIONS is turning the neighborhood shop cat into a Lower Manhattan pop-up. The more interesting story is that the shop cat already had a public role long before a brand decided to celebrate it.
Progressive Is Winning the Insurance Ad Game, One Tiny Humiliation at a Time
Culture
The long-running Dr. Rick campaign keeps finding fresh comedy in the moment adults realize they have crossed from understanding the culture around them to asking why anyone would do that.
The Black Market Behind the Fryer
Reported Feature
Once restaurant grease became renewable-fuel feedstock, the bin behind the kitchen became inventory — and thieves with pumps and tanks followed the value into the alley.
The Event Is Wherever the Dog Is
Event Any location (nationwide)
Pet Partners' World’s Largest Pet Walk has no central starting line, no required route and no minimum distance. Its ninth annual edition turns a simple walk with an animal into a national ritual held together by participation rather than place.
Fine, Knorr Got Us
Reported Feature
We do not usually write about limited-edition pantry products. We also do not usually have the brand already sitting in our pantry before the press release arrives.
The Family Costume Has Four Legs Now
Reported Feature
PetSmart's 2026 Halloween collection looks like a seasonal retail story. It is also evidence that pets are no longer adjacent to family rituals. Increasingly, they are cast in them.
More Data, Less Understanding
Reported Feature
Zappi's latest industry study finds companies connecting more consumer data while growing less satisfied with insights — a paradox about judgment that AI speed cannot solve by itself.
Parenting Now Comes With a Research Department
Reported Feature
More information was supposed to make caregiving choices easier. NIQ's new U.S. research suggests that, for many mothers, abundance has created another job: deciding which advice deserves to be trusted.
Manufacturing the Prediction
Reported Feature
Two days before Apple's September 9 event, Velvet Caviar already had more than 100 iPhone 18 Pro Max cases in stock — turning an unreleased phone's shape into warehouse inventory.
Your Dog Is Becoming a Data Source
Reported Feature
For most of human history, knowing a dog meant watching the dog. Connected collars are turning that relationship into a stream of location, activity and behavioral telemetry, and increasingly asking software to tell us what the animal means.
When an Object Becomes Part of You
Reported Feature
EPHEMERA is bringing Seoul's OIKEIOSIS MUSEUM to the U.S. with handmade ceramic rings and keyrings built around a Stoic idea: objects become part of you through use, not purchase.
New Jersey Joins FTC Challenge to Amazon’s Advertising Auction System
Reported Feature
Regulators say undisclosed reserve pricing changed what advertisers were paying. Amazon says the case misunderstands how its ad marketplace works and ignores performance gains for advertisers and shoppers.
Even the Dog Gets a Girl Scout Cookie Now
Reported Feature
Patch Pals, the first Girl Scout cookie made specifically for dogs, is more than a novelty line extension. It is another sign that pets are no longer standing beside American family rituals. They are being formally invited into them.
When Healthy Becomes a Moral Category
Reported Feature
A new analysis of TikTok and Instagram wellness posts found restrictive rules, “clean” eating ideals and widespread misinformation. The more interesting problem is what happens when nutrition advice starts grading the person holding the fork.
Liberty Biberty Did Not Need a Body
Culture
Liberty Mutual spent years building a weird, scrappy advertising universe one decent joke at a time. Then somebody looked at the funniest accidental character in the whole thing and decided what he really needed was to become a fuzzy yellow blob.
The Sandwich Has Acquired Counsel
Culture
Smucker spent decades turning a crustless PB&J into a recognizable industrial product. Now a federal court is being asked where sandwich architecture ends and brand identity begins.