Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 105

How United Could Have Avoided Frustrating Staff And Alienating Customers

This might surprise you, but Zappos doesn't offer standard overnight shipping. But for years customers of the site have been getting overnight shipping even though they didn't ask for or even pay extra for it. The reasoning is simple, if your customers have lower expectations - it is easy to consistently exceed them. We feel delight at getting the product overnight because it is faster than we thought it would be. 

This simple behavioral insight is something that most companies have done a...

How To Find The Perfect Diagram For Your Presentation

My life would be a lot easier if I could give the same talk to everyone. I would just show up at an event or a client site, or get onto my webcam, and say the exact same thing to everyone. But I know I'll never do that. One of the main reasons is because I obsess over any presentation I work on. I spend hours thinking about the flow. I have a personal library of hundreds of images purchased from various places like iStockPhoto. Anytime I find an interesting marketing idea or website, I take...

A Marketing Lesson From The Most Depressing Magazine Ever

I'm not really sure when I started getting Reader's Digest delivered to my home, or even if I subscribed to it. I am a sucker for magazines and always have been. So chances are I subscribed thanks to some sort of Grouponesque deal that I found online. Call it a marketing weakness, but if I get a magazine in the mail I can't help opening it. I always flip through - and I look mainly at the advertising.

The problem when I did that looking through Reader's Digest is that I started to get...

50 SXSW 2012 Panels Worth Getting Excited About

Here's a sad fact about SXSW - at any given time there are at least 16 other talks, events or meetups that you could be attending besides the one that you do make it to.  That's assuming you even make it to any events at all.  But whether you are ambitiously aiming to make it to a long list of events, or not going to SXSW at all ... the fact is that the range of talks offers a really interesting spotlight into trends and insights for anyone working in a digital or business role today. 

Some...

How MindValley Is Building the Next TED (Only More Useful)

This morning I watched an amazing TED video of flying robots that can operate autonomously and collaborate with each other at the same time. It is exciting technology ... just the kind of thing you would expect to come out of a TED event. As I write this, the video (and its big finish where the robots play a song together) is rapidly going viral online, and I have to admit I love watching things like this. The only problem is, I'm not sure what I can do with this mind blowing example except...

Likeonomics, Linsanity and Why The Oscars Really Matter

Jerry Weintraub, the producer of Ocean's Eleven, has a dirty little secret. When he talks about getting the first of the Ocean's movies made in 1998, he admits it had very little to do with the script and everything to do with the first two people that he convinced to agree to being part of the project ... Director Steven Soderburgh and actor George Clooney. The two of them used their personal relationships to recruit the rest of the dozen actors who would make up the all star cast which...

What Paulo Coelho Can Teach You About Storytelling & Writing

Sitting in a hotel room tonight putting the finishing touches on a presentation I am giving today on storytelling, I got an irresistable update to a new blog post over on Tim Ferriss' blog featuring a podcast interview with one of my longtime inspirations as a writer - Paolo Coelho.  His book The Alchemist is a life changing experience for anyone I know who has read it (including me). So when Tim published his interview, I immediately listened to the whole thing. I highly recommend it. 

In...

The Best And Worst Of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy 2012

I couldn't help but feel sorry this year for anyone who only watches the Super Bowl ads for entertainment. Perhaps the most defining feature of all the ads this year was how uniformly uncreative and dated they were. Marketers turned to old and obvious gags like girls in bikinis and dogs (lots of dogs) to try and carry their ads. The result was a very disappointing collection of ads for anyone who loves marketing and the hype of Super Bowl advertising. Still, there is plenty of marketing to...

What The Amish Paradox Can Teach You About Marketing

Last year on a trip back to the US from South Africa, I picked up a magazine about a topic I knew very little about. It is of the common tricks I use to learn about different industries outside of the ones I work directly with – and in this case, the magazine I ended up with was called Farmer's Weekly.

The content was as you would expect, advice for farmers on techniques, information about regulations that will affect their industry and ads for tractors and things like that. In the middle...

The 4 Principles Of Delusional Economics

When it comes to economic theories, there is plenty of fascination in the business world around how to explain what drives business and purchasing activities. Behavioural economics, the field of economics concerned with examining why people behave the way they do when it comes to their purchasing behaviour, is hot right now.  Bestselling books like Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational dig deep into the psyche of people to try and explain seemingly illogical actions.

My own upcoming book...