S&S Activewear has opened a 200,000-square-foot distribution center near Cincinnati that will allow for faster delivery to customers in the East and Midwest regions of the country. The center will employ about 175 people and could eventually expand.

Labor shortages, global political unrest and other ongoing issues are prompting businesses to localize manufacturing, shorten supply chains and increase the use of technologies such as artificial intelligence to make moving goods easier, according to Modifi's H2 2022 Predictions Report. "Organizations in every country are using technology to transform the way they do business to secure opportunities in an uncertain future," the report says.

Distributors leased 37 warehouses measuring more than 1 million square feet in the first half of 2022, up from 24 in the same period last year, according to real estate firm CBRE. The overall US industrial vacancy rate at the end of the second quarter was just 2.9%, suggesting that high demand is showing no signs of easing.

Six leaders in business-to-business marketing share their thoughts on how the industry is experiencing a resurgence of creativity and offer advice to marketers. "Simplify the complexity that gets in the way of a great creative product," says Mx Group's Emily Kleist, while Tipi Group's Jamie Ross-Skinner notes, "B2B suffers from a chronic dehumanization of customers, who want the same things as everyone else: to be loved, respected, entertained and sometimes left alone."

Gartner says marketing will continue to incorporate artificial intelligence, and its use will be propelled by technologies that monitor consumers' emotional reactions through vision analysis and other techniques. "By combining [Emotion AI] with computer vision to analyze the composition of each frame in a video, [machine learning] can discover which features (music, dialogue, celebrity appearances, logos, etc.) elicit the strongest responses or lead to tune-out among select contextual audience segments," Gartner says in a report.

Some phrases leaders often use, such as "That being said" or the classic "You don't need to know why," can undermine authority and diminish trust, writes Lolly Daskal. "Give focused attention to the things you say to your team -- and if those words aren't serving you well, make the changes you need to make," Daskal writes.

Information that is only tenuously related to the topic at hand can interfere with business decisions through a concept known as anchoring bias, writes Helen Lee Bouygues, president of the Reboot Foundation. On the other hand, establishing the right anchors can be an effective negotiation technique, Bouygues writes.

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