Field Notes · No. 01
The Spine
By the time a problem reaches your dashboard, the signals have been visible for months. The plan always looks sound: the logic holds, the deck presents well, revenue is going to grow, with better days just around the corner. But dashboards only show you numbers, not how customers feel about your brand. The signals fill in those gaps. Renewal rates, store traffic, customer sentiment, and what people are saying in reviews, surveys, and on social, all of it's already moving faster than your dashboard can update. Below are four archetypes that show what it looks like to read the signals and what it looks like to ignore them.
Lululemon: the slow miss
Lululemon is raising prices while losing the loyal customers who built the brand. These two facts belong in the same sentence, but will not appear on the same dashboard.
The signals are not subtle. The CEO is describing the core lineup as 'predictable' and 'stale'. Comparable sales in the Americas have been sliding, store traffic is down, while shoppers are checking out Alo and Vuori. The loudest signal of all is the dupe economy. People are quite happy to hunt $20 copies of $128 leggings and stories are being written about it. This is not a hidden signal, customers are yelling from the rooftops that the value proposition isn't there.
The response so far treats the symptoms: more SKUs and modest price hikes to offset tariffs. Strong international growth led by China is papering over the cracks in the home market. That is exactly how a dashboard hides a miss. The voice of the American consumer is crystal clear, but Lulu continues to misread the signals.
T-Mobile: the new king, same as the old king
T-Mobile built its whole brand on being different from the other carriers. The Un-carrier. In 2017 they went further and promised customers the price you sign up for would never go up. For life.
It took some time, but in May 2024 T-Mobile went back on its promise, raising prices on those plans from $5-$10 per line. Customers responded with a class action suit. Apple TV once bundled in with plans became $3/month in January 2026. There are no longer any acts of rebellion at the Un-carrier. Leadership now speaks like the others do, speaking of legacy rate plans and pricing actions. The un-carrier is now just a carrier.
Full credit for turning the wireless market on its head over a decade ago. They successfully disrupted the entire market, forcing all carriers to act. But those days are over. Marketing still wears the underdog costume while the receipts read like the company they were built to replace. The costume is the symptom, the receipts are the signal.
Costco: the value, proven in public
No doubt that most price increases are a calculated risk at best and a blind bet at the worst. Costco's price increase was a controlled experiment which told them everything.
September 2024 marked the first time Costco raised membership fees in seven years. The risk was obvious: charge more, lose members. It didn't happen. Renewals in the US and Canada held at about 92 percent, down just one tenth of one percent, while the increase drove about a third of fee growth. That is not luck, that is knowing your customer.
Costco wins when their members feel that they've won. They earned the right to increase membership by adding value first. That is the operating model.
Costco marks up products by around 11%, compared to the 25-50 percent in normal retail, making profit on memberships not markups. The $1.50 hot dog has held for 40 years, and they built their own meat plants to keep it that way. The same week they raised their fee, they also raised the cash back cap for top members.
To be clear, Costco did introduce some friction. They now check membership cards at the food court and reserve early shopping hours for higher premium-tier members. But the headline signal is hard to miss. When you raise the price and 92 percent still say yes, you have earned your customers trust and kept it.
Burger King: proof you can come back
Burger King is a brand that people have written off for years now. More of a punchline than a brand. Old stores, a confusing menu, slow lines, poor service. Nearly every brand in that spot would launch a splashy new campaign and spin up a new logo.
They reacted very differently. Their own research said the basics were the problem: inconsistent service and tired, unwelcoming restaurants. They put $400 million behind Reclaim the Flame, with $250 million of that being spent on remodels, new equipment, and operations. Money most brands would pour into advertising. Customers can now design their own Whoppers, which is listening with a cash register attached.
It worked. BK has outperformed the burger category for four straight years and lifted its modern-image stores from just over a third to 58 percent. It has not been a clean victory. 2025 profit took a step back as beef costs jumped more than 20 percent.
But the direction has been set and the lesson is a cheap one. They read the signals sitting in their own files and fixed the boring things instead of chasing flashy ones.
The spine
Four brands, one pattern. A dashboard is a history lesson. The signal tells you what your customers have already decided about the future. Costco read the signals and the usual 92 percent of members renewed anyway, right through a price hike. Burger King recognized the signals late, but used its own research to claw its way back. Lululemon and T-Mobile are still reading decks instead of the room.
Trust is a leading indicator, revenue a lagging one. The signal is always out there, and it is always cheaper to read than the quarterly report. The only question is whether anyone inside the building is paying attention.