Informedi’s Weekly Business Insights

Ask a Westerner for an example of a successful Chinese consumer-goods brand, and until recently most would have struggled. Although China is the world’s premier manufacturing power, it has long lagged behind when it comes to imaginative home-grown retail brands and products, even as its factories have cranked out vast numbers of them for foreign companies. This is now changing. Innovative Chinese brands are popping up everywhere. Consumers and investors around the world stand to benefit

From Stockholm to Sydney, the electric car gliding silently by is increasingly likely to be Chinese. Mixue, a purveyor of ice-cream and cold drinks, has dethroned McDonald’s as the world’s largest fast-food chain by number of outlets. It is expanding in South America, as is Meituan, a Beijing-based delivery app. Chagee, a chain of tea shops, is on track to have at least 1,300 stores outside China by the end of 2027, mainly in South-East Asia; a few years ago it had barely any. And Pop Mart, a Chinese toymaker, has created a buzz worthy of Disney around its strange grinning (or are they grimacing?) nine-toothed dolls, called Labubus. Fans include Rihanna, a pop star, and Sir David Beckham, a retired footballer.

Chinese brands were long seen as poor-quality, unimaginative and unfairly subsidised. Scandals around food safety and labour standards did not help.  New firms are now overturning those old assumptions. Many happily advertise their roots.  Many brands now compete on quality as well as price.

In the past, Chinese firms typically succeeded by learning to replicate Western products cheaply. Now they are accumulating valuable intellectual property of their own. And though state media outlets laud Labubus, the government does little to subsidise these new consumer firms (with the exception of electric-carmakers). Indeed, China’s capital markets, which are tasked with nurturing technologies to beat America, are stacked against them. Consumer firms have received only 3% of the capital raised in listings on the mainland over the past two years. Chipmakers have taken five times as much.

The rise of Chinese consumer brands is good for shoppers everywhere: they now have a wider array of innovative products to choose from. Investors, too, should welcome the sight of oddly mesmerising dolls and the taste of red-bean ice-cream.

Western firms will have to wake up and smell the bubble tea. Within China, the premium that foreign brands command simply for being foreign is eroding. In the future they will need to try harder to understand Chinese customers’ particular tastes. Some may even do deals with inventive Chinese partners, to gain insight and inspiration. These are still early days for Chinese marques’ foray into global markets. But Chinese carmakers are already forcing Western rivals to reconsider their strategies. And competition from China may eventually push Disney, Mattel and other Western mega-brands to new heights of creativity. Chinese brands’ westward journey, like the Monkey King’s, could bring lavish rewards.

Factories have used fossil fuels to process iron ore for three centuries, and the climate has paid a heavy price: According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the steel industry today accounts for 8% of carbon dioxide emissions. Purifying the ore involves extracting iron that is bound to oxygen, and “removing the bond between the iron and oxygen requires a massive amount of energy,” says Michels, the 39-year-old CEO of HyIron, the startup behind the project. 

But it turns out there is a less carbon-­intensive alternative: using hydrogen to extract the iron. Unlike coal or natural gas, which release carbon dioxide as a by-product, this process, Michels explains, releases water. And if the hydrogen itself is “green”—meaning it’s made through renewable-­powered electrolysis rather than the conventional technique of mixing natural gas and steam—the climate impact of the entire process will be minimal.

HyIron, which began processing test batches of iron a month after my visit, is one of a handful of companies around the world that are betting green hydrogen can help the $1.8 trillion steel industry clean up its act. What sets it apart, above all, is its location. HyIron’s kiln was designed and prototyped in Germany, but the production site is in Namibia, more than 5,000 miles to the south. This former German colony, which was ruled by South Africa from 1915 to 1990, has little industry itself and is an ocean or two away from the world’s biggest importers of iron. What it does have is immense untapped potential for wind and solar power, which studies suggest could make it possible to produce hydrogen and its derivative products, like iron, ammonia, and low-carbon aviation fuel, as cheaply as is feasible anywhere. HyIron’s site in the Namib Desert, 50 miles from the Atlantic coast, averages just 30 hours of overcast skies per year, Michels tells me. The energy potential here, he says, is “incredible.”

Michels, who trained as an economist and started HyIron as a side project when his family-owned safari lodge went quiet during the covid pandemic, isn’t the only Namibian with big plans for hydrogen. Since 2021, when the government identified the gas as a potentially “transformative strategic industry,” it’s become something of a national obsession. There are at least nine other projects planned or under construction, including one, in Namibia’s south, that’s among the largest proposed green hydrogen investments in the world. The Namibian government’s Green Hydrogen and Derivatives Strategy, released in 2022, envisions the creation of three “hydrogen valleys,” along the southern, central, and northern coasts, with a target production of 10 million to 12 million metric tons per year by 2050. That’s equivalent to more than 10% of all hydrogen made annually today. As soon as 2030, the strategy document claims, the industry could create 80,000 jobs and raise GDP by 30% through a combination of tax revenue, royalties, and the knock-on effect of so many investments. 

If even a fraction of this production comes to pass, it will give Namibia’s economy a major boost. But it is a gamble. Green hydrogen technology is still in its infancy, and long-term demand for its products remains uncertain. Pursuing a technology that isn’t yet commercially established, some critics fear, could strain government resources and distract from more urgent priorities, including the persistence of hunger and a domestic power grid that reaches only half of Namibia’s households. This is especially the case with the largest project under development, along the country’s southern coast, which will require at least $10 billion to get off the ground, a figure nearly as big as Namibia’s GDP today. That venture is contentious for environmental reasons, too: Under current plans, most of its infrastructure will be built inside a national park in a location Namibia’s top environmental watchdog calls the “most sensitive ecosystem in southern Africa.”

“Given the small country that we are, we’re risking quite a lot entering into this global race,” says Ronny Dempers, executive director of the Namibia Development Trust, which advocates for community-based management of natural resources. 

Adding to the uncertainty is the death last year of Namibian president Hage Geingob, the hydrogen strategy’s chief political backer. The new president, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, who took office in March, hails from the same political party, but multiple people familiar with her thinking told me she’s keener on developing oil and natural gas. 

Nonetheless, HyIron’s launch has given Namibia’s hydrogen ambitions a long-awaited jolt of momentum. 

The question now is whether Namibia’s government, its trading partners, and hydrogen innovators like Michels can work together to build the industry in a way that satisfies the world’s appetite for cleaner fuels—and also helps improve lives at home.

Tariffs have surged into the public spotlight. On April 2, 2025, the United States unveiled country-specific tariffs, defined by a formula based on goods trade deficits. Tariffs have substantially receded from those highs since and may continue to shift in the coming weeks and months as negotiations and court challenges unfold.

Yet substantial trade tensions between the United States and China could be here to stay.1 When combined with prior policy measures, tariffs and geopolitics clearly correspond: economies that are more “geopolitically distant” from the United States, particularly China, tend to face the highest tariffs. If current settings persist, US imports may shift from China to countries that face lower tariffs and historically have been more geopolitically aligned with the United States.

Even before 2025, the geometry of trade had been shifting along geopolitical lines. The average geopolitical distance of global goods started to compress beginning around 2018, particularly for the United States and China—evidence of so-called friendshoring.  

Recent events may accelerate this realignment. Many US firms are urgently considering alternative sources of supply. Without a shift to different sources, prices may rise, and US companies and consumers might need to reduce—making do with fewer products or inputs—or replace, substituting one product for another sufficiently similar one. The higher the tariffs, the more significant the potential reduction or replacement.

An alternative is to ramp up existing US manufacturing capabilities (cars) and rebuild dormant ones (chips and ships). This change could happen in other countries, too. But it takes time, money, and know-how. And at least in the case of the United States, where wages are high, it may not be economically viable in some sectors.

The authors introduce a “rearrangement ratio” to quantify how hard the change might be. Thirty-five percent of US imports from China have a ratio less than 0.1, signifying a global available export market ten times larger than current US imports from China—think T-shirts or logic chips. For higher ratios, rearrangement becomes harder, and for the 5 percent of trade with a ratio greater than 1.0—for example, rare earth magnets—US imports from China exceed available global exports.

Consumer goods are harder to rearrange than business inputs. Sixty-one percent of business input imports have a rearrangement ratio less than 0.1, versus 16 percent of consumer goods. Major products like laptops, smartphones, and toys are harder to rearrange.

Europe emerges as the fulcrum of trade rearrangement. Across nine varied simulations, European imports from China and exports to the United States both go up by nearly $200 billion. As intra-European trade shifts to the United States, it leaves holes filled by increased Chinese exports—assuming Europe does not choose to alter its own trade policies. Others will be affected, too: exports to the United States from as many as 70 countries may increase by more than 10 percent.

Prepare for resilience in a reordering world. Strategies will need to handle continued uncertainty and ongoing shifts. Customers will buy new things from new sources and use them in new ways. 

Specifics matter. Shifts may look very different across the many thousands of products that make up the global web of trade. When making strategic decisions for their organizations, leaders should examine fine-grained product market dynamics to understand where there may be surpluses or shortages, price sensitivity or rigidity, and granular pockets of decline or growth.

Trade rearrangement promises to reshape the geometry of global trade, setting the backdrop as firms build resilience in a reordering world.

Are we wisely waiting or merely drifting? That’s a question many corporate leaders will be asking themselves in the coming weeks and months. Uncertainty is not a new concept. But today’s political uncertainty — epitomized by the U.S. tariff edicts and global responses to them, ranging from threats to negotiation — seems to be having a distinct, paralyzing effect.

Wait and see can be a dysfunctional response to change or uncertainty if it leads to missed opportunities or an increase in the eventual cost or risks related to actions. However, wait and see can also be a smart strategy for delaying commitments while observing an evolving situation.   When should a wait-and-see strategy be deployed, and how can it be executed effectively? Let’s explore the key issues for corporate leaders.  

When to Wait and See.  In reality, wait-and-see strategies are used successfully well beyond the corporate realm. Their viability hinges on two conditions: First, wait and see can be successful only if uncertainty is elevated temporarily.  Second, wait and see is especially reasonable when the context is reflexive — that is, actions taken may spark reactions that further increase uncertainty or even increase the probability of a negative outcome.

In an environment characterized by political uncertainty — which is temporary and in which actions may lead to backlash — adopting a wait-and-see approach may be advantageous. This approach enables businesses to steer clear of hard-to-reverse commitments in a shifting context and to avoid decisions or announcements that may lead to political or public backlash.

When Waiting Isn’t Enough.  Political uncertainty does not play out uniformly for all companies. How a company deals with it will depend on whether it has access to unique policy insights, whether its business faces an existential threat, or whether it finds itself in a period of protracted uncertainty.  Finally, businesses may face a protracted period of regularly occurring surprises, each of which has the potential to alter the path to future success. When elevated uncertainty endures and creates a multitude of plausible futures, passively waiting can become dysfunctional. In such a context, companies need to create options that may pay off in many different future states of the world. 

In this “many futures” environment, maximum optionality could be achieved by, for example, creating fully modular car platforms that could accommodate many designs and be assembled anywhere on the globe. Coupled with subscription or swap services that let consumers switch between cars as local incentives change, this type of strategy would allow for greater business flexibility. However, creating options does not have to be so disruptive; a company may also make a smaller side bet on a potential future.

A wait-and-see approach can be helpfully thought of as a holding pattern: a low-energy state in which companies “keep their powder dry” while observing an evolving situation. During this time, the company can design its next move — which may entail making a bet on one specific future or investing in setting up options that may pay off in different potential states of the world.

How to do a wait-and-see approach right: 

Actively Disengage.  Wait and see should not be confused with just letting things happen to you. Nor does it mean a full-on shutdown of activities. Rather, if done right, this approach means actively avoiding major commitments so as to not get stuck on a path that may no longer be viable under shifting conditions, and minimizing the risk of unproductive political entanglement.

Stay Alert.  In wait-and-see mode, the seeing element is as important as waiting. Businesses need to continuously track developments so as to seize opportunities and prepare for shocks. Toward this end, they need to strengthen their political sensing capabilities.

Prepare to Reengage.  Just like an animal entering torpor, a business taking a wait-and-see approach must build in rapid reversibility — that is, the ability to quickly reengage when the time is right. Wait and see should not be confused with hibernation.  For leaders, this means defining wake-up triggers — policy decisions, leadership changes, or competitors’ moves that will warrant a response.

If you have decided on a wait-and-see strategy amid the current political uncertainty, you should explore the following questions and be ready to explain the answers to your team.  Are we just drifting, or actively waiting?  Do we understand which decisions may lead to lock-in risks or political pushback?   How confident are we in our ability to detect signals on policy moves and competitor shifts?  What precise triggers will shift us from “pause” to “go” mode?  Do we have playbooks ready for reengagement, and have we practiced deploying them?

In 2014 Hong Kong–based Deep Knowledge Ventures formally appointed an algorithm to its board of directors, giving it voting power on the VC firm’s investment decisions. At the time, the appointment was seen as a gimmick. The algorithm simply analyzed quantitative data according to parameters chosen by humans to produce a base recommendation that the board members could debate. It was useful because it was faster than a human data analyst, but few observers believed that virtual board members would become commonplace.

Fast-forward a decade, and you might think that the remarkable advances in machine learning would have changed minds about the value of AI in the boardroom. But largely, that hasn’t been the case. From June to September of 2024, the authors conducted several focus groups with more than 50 board chairs, vice chairs, and committee chairs from public and private companies in Europe, Asia, and North America, including ASM, Lazard, Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, Randstad, Sandoz, and Shell. When they asked participants to rank the importance of various issues claiming their attention, they placed AI relatively low—well beneath issues such as global context and interaction with the CEO or significant shareholders. Most people reported using AI occasionally for personal needs but never or rarely for fulfilling their professional roles.

But in light of recent developments in AI technologies, and with virtual humans becoming commonplace business interfaces, the idea of an AI bot that engages in boardroom discussions doesn’t feel like a gimmick anymore. And while most of the focused group participants were skeptical of AI’s use for their board work, a significant number did share positive experiences of using AI.

AI can contribute to boards’ work in three ways.

Assisting individual board members. Directors are part-timers; typically they meet just four times a year and often serve on multiple boards. Yet they make key decisions for the organizations on whose boards they serve.  nonexecutive directors are detached from the operations and have limited time. As a result, they struggle to absorb the large quantities of information available. AI can help. A properly trained LLM such as ChatGPT can analyze large volumes of data to discover relevant patterns and trends that might not be apparent through the manual analysis directors themselves perform. It can continuously monitor various risks and provide early warnings, enabling proactive risk management. What’s more, it can condense all that information into easy-to-read formats, reducing the time and effort required for board members to process it.

Supplying the whole board with better information.  Most directors are fans of scenario planning. 

nevertheless, few boards practicing real scenario planning and analysis. Most chairs justify the omission by saying that the exercise would be too complex and that the board’s resources are limited.  AI can fix this, as it needs much less time than a team of human experts would to identify and assess potential changes in underlying variables and estimate their likely effect on the company’s value.  Some boards are using AI to give them a reality check on their decisions.  AI can also analyze board processes.

Joining the board. The logical next step is to have AI actively participate in boardroom discussions, and this is starting to happen. In 2024 United Arab Emirates’ largest publicly traded entity, IHC, appointed Aiden Insight, a virtual human, as a “board observer.” Aiden Insight doesn’t have voting rights, but its participation in IHC board discussions goes into the official minutes.  Aiden and others like it are not perfect, of course. The lack of emotions and situational awareness makes it difficult for the likes of ChatGPT and other programs to participate without an explicit prompt.

While there certainly are risks, they are, for the most part, relatively easy to manage. Let’s review the concerns cited most frequently in our focus groups:  Information leaks.  Sample bias.  And anchoring in the past.  

For the next decade or so, until a high level of digital literacy becomes a basic skill that virtually every professional possesses, directors will need to be trained in using AI.  How can we do it:  Create engagement.  Practice collective experimentation.  And maintain momentum.

A key lesson advocated in the 1980s management bestseller In Search of Excellence advised leaders to “stick with your knitting” and remain “only with the businesses you know best.” That insularity may have hurt adaptiveness a generation ago and is surely not the wisdom for the AI generation. Two weeks ago, at 154th Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute CEO Forum, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang revealed to 175 top CEOs across industries how he tossed out his business plans not once but twice to embrace disruptive new advances on the frontiers of technology, drawing upon the model of his idol, Michael Dell.

And Huang’s idol could not help but praise the Nvidia CEO for his performance leading the organization to the forefront of global business.  At 154th Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute CEO Forum this performance was applauded with the “Legend in Leadership” award in recognition of his unmatched success – Dell, along with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, presented this award to Hung.

But what often receives less recognition is the source of Huang’s accomplishments: the ability to adapt and the humility with which he continues to lead, even after all his triumphs. The authors’ interaction with him quickly revealed how unique a leader he is.

In the 1980s, Intel cofounder Andy Grove warned that “only the paranoid survive,” suggesting key inflection points in strategic decision making. These days, Huang says that this fluid mindset is daily and not episodic. Now battling with Microsoft to claim the title of the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization.  

Benioff described Huang as someone who predicted that “the future of Nvidia and the future of our industry would be AI.” He added, “No one else could see that…It was vision. It was clarity. It was purpose. [Jensen] is incredible.”

Since Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993, the company has worked relentlessly to pioneer accelerated computing. Its first major success came when it revolutionized the gaming industry with the popularization of graphics processing units (GPUs) to improve computer graphics. That laid the foundation for modern AI and led the organization to eventually power much of the world’s AI factories and infrastructure, rewiring industry, technology, and aspects of society.

Nvidia was founded with a contrarian perspective to “reinvent computers,” as Huang told leaders at the CEO summit. Instead of replacing general-purpose computing, as many aimed to do at the time, Huang and his cofounders believed it would be wiser to augment it. “It turned out we were right,” he modestly quipped. The gamble paid off, allowing the chip producer to lead in GPUs.

Then, more than 15 years later, in 2010, Nvidia pivoted after discovering that its CUDA programming model could be adapted to solve deep learning problems. “The great observation that we made was…the approach of deep learning was quite generalizable,” Huang continued. “We imagined what would happen if we were to scale this problem and ultimately imagined what could be done if unsupervised learning, where every single piece of data doesn’t have to be human labeled, were to be discovered.”

He did not stop there. Eight years later, Nvidia adapted again. The final “great observation” Huang and his team made was that “AI is really about a whole new industry,” as he told us. It was an industry likely to “transform every industry…like electricity.

Reflecting on his success, Huang shared what led him and Nvidia to where they are today: “We had the courage to break the problem down step by step and reinvented everything about our company and everything about how computing was done.”

Perhaps Huang’s most admirable attribute, however, is his humility. He began his remarks by thanking Benioff, Krishna, and Dell for presenting his award, calling them “heroes of mine.” He consistently credited his cofounders and the team at Nvidia during his comments. And he closed by again paying tribute to his three award presenters, crediting them as having “been so instrumental in shaping the computer industry that we know today.”

Rarely do leaders as successful as Huang possess the ability to adapt seamlessly, lead effectively through periods of disruption, and publicly recognize the contributions of other industry titans who came to prominence before them.

Reflecting on Huang’s pivot, IBM’s Krishna told the gathered CEOs, “Pivoting the whole company away from what had made [them] money for over 20 years…that takes courage beyond vision…[only he had] the fortitude, the grit as well as the brilliance to be able to get there.”

A recent report from financial services consultant DALBAR concluded that the average equity investor earned a 16.54% return in 2024. That may sound like a win, but the S&P 500 grew 25.02% in the same period. The S&P 500 is widely viewed as a benchmark for the overall stock market—which means the average investor under-performed the market by over 8.4 percentage points.

The lag is surprising, given that investors can buy an S&P 500 ETF to keep pace with the market before fees. The DALBAR analysis said “investors continued to under-perform due to their own behavior,” citing withdrawals from equity funds just before market surges.

If you have $10,000 invested, an 840-basis-point miss costs you $840. Repeat the same mistakes a few years in a row and your net worth is thousands below where it could be. Let’s sidestep that outcome by learning about eight potentially expensive investing mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Not Investing.  Cash is important to have on hand. You need it to cover unexpected expenses or income changes. Unfortunately, bank deposits don’t offer the same wealth opportunities as stocks. If you want to grow your net worth, stock investing is one of the simplest ways to do it.  Open a low-cost brokerage account and invest monthly in an S&P 500 ETF. Your monthly budget can be small to start, but plan on increasing it as you get more comfortable.
2. Timing The Market.  Timing the market is an investing strategy that attempts to predict stock price trends and profit from them. Imagine knowing ahead of time that stocks would fall dramatically on Monday and then surge back on Tuesday. You’d invest on Monday when prices are low and sell on Tuesday for a quick profit.  The problem is that making these predictions accurately is difficult. Even professional investors have spotty records in this area.  Invest consistently every month, whether the market is strong or weak. And the next time stock prices fall, challenge yourself to wait it out. Hold your portfolio the same and see what happens on the other side.
3. Following The Crowd.  When investors are optimistic, stock prices rise. When investors are discouraged, stock prices fall. Getting caught up in these sentiments encourages you to buy high and sell low. You can’t make a profit that way.  This is why famous, billionaire investor Warren Buffett once advised investors to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.” This contrarian approach makes it easier to buy low and sell high, which is what you want.  Don’t buy or sell because everyone else is doing it. If you feel the need to take action in a down market, increase your holdings in high-quality stocks when their prices are down. You’ll be well-positioned for gains when the market recovers.
4. Going All In.  Going all in refers to spending your entire investing budget on one stock or one industry. This strategy can expose you to extreme volatility and high loss potential. It can also prompt you to make other investing mistakes, such as timing the market, following the crowd and emotional decision-making.  Diversification is the solution. Spread your wealth across at least 20 individual stocks plus some Treasury securities if you can. Or, invest in ETFs with well-diversified portfolios.
5. Paying High Fees.  Account fees, fund fees and trading fees pull money away from your investments and lower your returns. You can’t avoid all investing fees, but you can make sure you’re not paying more than you need to.  Dive into your brokerage account and funds to list the fees you’re currently paying. Then look for lower-fee alternatives for the account itself or your investments.
6. Skipping The Research.  Making investing decisions based on limited information can be dangerous, particularly if you’re picking stocks. Fund-based investing strategies are less research-intensive, but you still should understand what you’re buying and how you can expect it to perform.  Spend time educating yourself. You could allocate a short, weekly time slot on your calendar for this. Use it to research securities or investing strategies. Ask questions and find answers. The more time you put in, the better investor you’ll be.
7. Getting Emotional.  Emotions can convince you to sell when the market is down, even though logic says stock prices will eventually recover. Emotions can also urge you to buy tech stocks at crazy-high valuations, even though logic says there’s a point at which their prices become unsustainably high.  If you don’t have a long-term strategy, make one. Document what you’re trying to accomplish and how you will do it. Include your methods for making trade decisions, and the criteria that make a security buy-worthy or sell-worthy. The next time you feel like making a rash decision, go to your documentation and follow the methodology you defined in calmer times.
8. Investing What You Can’t Afford To Lose.  Inevitably, your investments will lose value. Panic can result if the loss pinches your finances. At best, panic can push you into emotionally driven decisions like selling securities to avoid deeper losses. At worst, panic can encourage you to chase gains to recoup lost capital. That can lead to bigger losses and more panic.  Build a cash emergency fund before you start investing. Use that fund for unexpected expenses, so you won’t have to reach into your portfolio. Also, only invest money you won’t need for at least five years.

It’s a frustrating feeling — you’ve built a product that solves a real problem. You’ve spent weeks/months getting your landing page in shape, writing great copy, setting up campaigns, maybe even throwing in a few influencer shoutouts. But for some reason, it just is not working. Sales are coming in slowly, the numbers don’t justify the effort, people are bouncing, not buying or worse — they are not even noticing.  If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. A lot of products, even good ones, struggle to get off the ground, not always because of the product itself, but because the marketing strategy is working against it.  Here are some reasons that might be happening, and what to look at before you throw more money at another campaign.

1. You are too focused on features.  A long list of product features looks impressive on a website. But most buyers aren’t looking for impressive, they’re looking for something that helps them with a specific situation they’re dealing with.  When marketing focuses heavily on what the product does, instead of what it helps someone do, it often misses the point.  Walk through the actual moment a person would use the product. What’s happening around them? What problem is already on their mind when they find you? That’s what they care about.
2. You are targeting the wrong people (or too many at once).  It’s common to want your product to appeal to as many people as possible. But marketing built to please everyone usually ends up resonating with no one in particular.  Sometimes it’s not even a case of bad targeting, it’s just unclear targeting.  Refining your audience doesn’t mean giving up on reach. It just means narrowing your focus enough to actually connect. Once you know who’s getting the most value, it’s easier to build trust with the right people, and that’s where growth usually starts.
3. The first impression isn’t built for the channel.  A homepage is not the same as an ad, and a product page isn’t the same as a social media post. But sometimes, the same language or design is used across all of them, and it doesn’t translate well.  Every channel has a different kind of attention span and expectation. If the first thing people see isn’t relevant to why they clicked or where they came from, they’ll leave quickly, and it won’t be because the product is bad.
4. Your content is not helping people make a decision.  It’s easy to forget how many decisions go into a purchase, especially for something unfamiliar. People don’t just want to know what your product is — they want to know how it compares to what they’re already using, what setup is involved, whether it’ll work for their use case and how others are using it.  If your marketing content skips over this and just asks for the sale, you might be missing the middle part of the journey. This is where things like demos, comparison pages or case studies start to matter; not just as credibility boosters, but also helping people figure out whether this is a good fit for them.
5. You’re relying too much on one tactic.  Sometimes, the marketing isn’t failing — you are using one ad format, one channel, one piece of copy reused everywhere. If that single thing isn’t working, then everything else starts to feel like a failure, too.  Even if you’ve found something that converts well, relying on it too much can become a risk, algorithms change, audiences burn out, and if your strategy is built on one pillar, there isn’t much room to adapt.  A more balanced approach can mean thinking through three different ways someone might discover you: search, social and referral. Or three different types of content: awareness, education and action. Spread out your efforts a bit, and when one thing underperforms, it won’t tank everything else.
6. The product itself isn’t positioned enough.  Even if your product is great, if people don’t understand what it is or how it fits into their life, they won’t buy it. Positioning is what tells people why your product exists and who it’s for.  If your pitch sounds too much like every other tool or service in your space, you’re making it harder for people to choose you. On the other hand, if your messaging is so different that people can’t figure out what you even offer, that’s a problem, too. Just note that a product that solves a boring but urgent problem usually wins over a product that sounds amazing but feels irrelevant.

Taking over the family business sounds like a natural next step for many people, but in reality, it’s often anything but simple. Between generational differences, shifting business landscapes, and overcoming the natural perception that the title was simply given, there’s a lot more to the handoff than most people think.

At Soft Touch Furniture, a Girard, Ohio-based manufacturer of commercial restaurant furniture founded in 1974, a second-generation owner is learning how to carry forward a legacy while confidently building something new, with buy-in from everyone in the building.

Over the last decade-plus, Megan Vickers, Soft Touch’s current president, has been groomed to succeed her parents, co-founders Bob and Terrie Chudakoff. Here’s what she has to say about taking the reins from her parents, the lessons she had to learn (sometimes the hard way), and why respecting the past is just as important as moving forward.

What’s the most important thing you’d tell someone else taking over the family business?  The most important thing is to listen.  Don’t come in thinking you need to change everything right away. There’s a lot of wisdom and hard-earned experience in how the business was built, from both the founders and the employees. Even if you eventually go in a different direction, you need to understand the foundation first.

Did you always know you wanted to be in the family business?  Actually, no. I went to school for Criminal Justice and Psychology. But growing up, I was always exposed to the business – my parents were constantly working on it, and over time, I got curious about how everything ran: operations, clients, decision-making, all of it. And then I realized – this was where I really wanted to be.  My siblings chose different paths, and I completely respect that. But my dad always sensed I had a natural pull towards the business. I think having a genuine interest really matters. Running a company is all-consuming. If your heart’s not in it, it eventually shows.

What are the unique challenges of stepping into a family-run company?  There’s a strong emotional layer. You’re not just managing a business – you’re carrying a legacy. That brings pressure. Decisions aren’t just strategic, they’re personal. You need to navigate what’s best for the company versus what feels right for the family dynamic.  Then there’s the challenge of earning respect, not just because of your last name, but because of your own work ethic, ideas, and leadership. That takes time, and it takes building good business relationships with both your parents and the employees long before you take over. They need to know, from their own experiences with you, that the company is in good hands. From my own experience, I would say it helps immensely to work in the business long before you take over, and learn the various aspects of it from the people you will eventually lead. 

Did your relationship with your parents ever get in the way?  Yes, and I think that’s natural. First off, I love and respect my parents deeply. But when someone pours their life into building something, it’s not easy for them to let go. There were definitely moments where our perspectives clashed. Not out of malice, but because we simply see things differently.  The key is open communication and mutual respect. I’ve come to see those tough moments as growth opportunities. And now that I’m older and my parents have stepped away, I have even more appreciation for everything they did.

How do you balance your dad’s continued advice with your own instincts?  Very carefully. I have to remind myself that his advice is invaluable. This is because he’s lived through market changes, tough customers, staffing issues, you name it. But I also must interpret that advice through today’s lens.