Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 39

Harper Collins Identifies Eco-Friendly Fonts to Save Thousands of Trees and Reduce Paper Usage

Every few months there are new sustainability stories of the world’s largest brands trying to create less wasteful packaging. Coca-Cola announced a new lighter bottle design this week and a few months ago began a trial shipping label-free bottles of Sprite. These types of initiatives are common in the packaged food industry, but what if other industries could greenlight similar initiatives to create sustainability solutions of their own?

Harper Collins has been doing something similar in ...

The Disturbing Truth About How Trader Joe’s Sources New Products

Trader Joe’s doesn’t seem like an evil brand. Their personality-driven backstory offers an irresistible underdog mentality that drives rabid brand fans who celebrate every new product arrival. Unfortunately, a story released this week reveals that many of their ethnic private label products may be blatantly stolen knock-offs of product ideas from small brands who had been negotiating with TJs before being abruptly ghosted.

While the  (called “dupes”) has...

How AI Is Making April Fool’s Day Easier … and Harder

This week my Future Normal co-author Henry and I announced a bold new partnership with LEGO to create a series of limited edition future-thinking sets inspired by trends from our book. The idea was that people could imagine a better future through play. The idea, as my post shared, was just one element of our “bold two decade-long series of Non-Obvious partnerships with brands that have four letters in their name. Based on a decade of intense research, we have determined that four is the optimal...

What The “Bridesmaid Burnout” Tells Us About the Future of Friendship

Back in early Fall of 2023, Glamour magazine launched a series of articles on the topic of “bridesmaid burnout.” Inspired by the spiraling demands of time, money and emotional labor heaped upon bridesmaids, the series collected advice on everything from asking about financial expectations to how to decline being a bridesmaid without killing your friendship.

Are modern bridesmaids unwilling to just show up and be good friends anymore? Or have the expectations really become more unreasonable? As th...

How To Post on LinkedIn (Or Social Media) Without Feeling Embarrassed

LinkedIn can be a cringey place. As a “jobs board with a social network layered on top of it,” the platform has a consistent stream of people posting about their professional lives in moments of transition, desperation or elation. 

As a result, we all consistently end up on the receiving end of everything from self-congratulatory posts where people unnecessarily declare themselves “humbled” by their own achievements to thinly disguised calls for help from people facing a daunting moment of career...

What’s Wrong with God Chatbots? Inside the AI Future of Religion

Nearly every faith now has several chatbots trained on religious texts and designed by technologists with the ambitious belief that these could make religion more approachable and accessible for a new generation.

An article from this month’s Scientific American magazine notes that in addition to allowing anyone to seek spiritual guidance from bots that promise to offer “faithful translations of the scriptures,” academics are also using these tools to compare “linguistic variations” among translat...

This Brilliant Nonprofit Might Have the Answer to Solve America’s Political Division

The widely publicized death of local news has created a knowledge and truth void when it comes to very important public questions. Like how are your tax dollars being spent? And what decisions are being made on a local level that affect your life and your community? Unless you happen to be a citizen with a deep commitment to doing your civic duty, what you know about politics is probably shaped by the circus of national news media. This is bad for many reasons, but the biggest is that a lack of ...

The Good and Bad of Planning Your Next Trip Using AI Travel Tools

The promise is appealing. Just put your desired holiday destination into an AI travel planning tool and it can quickly generate a sample itinerary with all the must-visit sights from a certain destination. Yet as one journalist found when doing a test of AI as a trip planning assistant, there are some pretty big tradeoffs you’ll need to be willing to make.

To start, there is the obvious limitation that AI will likely use outdated information to build the itinerary – which means restaurants that h...

Do You Have the Right to Recline in a Crowded Airplane Economy Seat?

Seat reclining does not improve your leg room.

That’s just one of the underappreciated truths about airplane seats that seems like it needs to be said repeatedly out loud for traveler’s benefit as we head into the busy Spring and Summer travel seasons. If you have suffered through having an unexpectedly reclined seat shoved toward your face, or fought a silent battle over whether reclining your own seat is somehow against common airplane social etiquette, this article is a necessary read....

Barilla and the Marketing Pitfall of the Unnecessary Celebrity Spokesperson

Pasta boxes are the perfect packaging to reuse. Pasta leaves no residue, and the boxes are generally large enough to fit other items. That’s clearly the inspiration for a new campaign from Barilla that promotes box reusability in time for Global Recycling Day. The campaign casts tidying guru Marie Kondo as the spokesperson and their campaign video starts with Kondo carefully folding a pair of socks that apparently she has sold through a secondhand market.

Putting aside the unlikely idea t...