Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 50

Monopoly Makes Kids Angry, For Their Own Good

“Throwing the Monopoly board across the room has the potential to strengthen your relationship with your family.” That’s the unusual insight at the heart of a new brand advertising campaign from Monopoly that showcases kids raging after a turn doesn’t go their way.

I really wish I was in the room when they presented the insight behind this campaign to Hasbro. It’s bold, clever and deep in a way you don’t expect marketing to be. If it hasn’t already, this is sure to win some industry awards. A...

What If We Could Repurpose All Parking Lots?

Non-Obvious Story of the Week with Rohit Bhargava

Parking lots are an eyesore and steal livable space in many cities, yet they have always been treated as a necessary urban evil. But what about in ten years? Or twenty? As cities build out more convenient and faster public transportation, many of these current parking garages may not be so useful in the future.

Anticipating this, a duo of architecture firms in Calgary have created the design for a convertible parking lot that can easily b...

Frederick Douglass and How Photos Will Shape Our Idea History In the Future

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

Frederick Douglass wrote these words nearly 150 years ago, but hearing them this week as I watched a production of American Prophet playing at Arena Stage, they felt like a surprisingly relevant reminder to speak out for a more just world. Already being descri...

A Sadly Common Case Study In Leadership Failure

Last year Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa banned the usage of agrochemicals by local farmers in an attempt to become the first country with 100% organic agriculture. On the surface, the move seems like a perfect example of visionary leadership. Just over a year later, it is being declared a failed experiment. The “catastrophically wrong” initiative resulted in lower farming yields, barren farmland usage and widespread farmer protests. What went wrong?

This story is a sadly recognizabl...

3 Marketing Lessons From The Minions Movie

Last night we got dressed up to see a movie.

To be more specific, my boys and a group of their friends created their own matching yellow t-shirts while I sported a black t-shirt and Gru-scarf to complete our crew. Our dedication was slightly before the full hype started for for the latest installment in the Minions franchise – Minions: The Rise of Gru. This #minionscult fever has led the film to a blockbuster opening and a meme that has overtaken Tik Tok and other social media platforms, fil...

Why Coffee Might Make You Impulsively Buy Useless Junk

Never drink coffee right before shopping. I was reading a research study this week about how the caffeine in coffee leads to impulsive shopping behavior and as a coffee lover, I was tempted to dismiss it. Then I thought about the Kickstarter I funded for a perfume that smells like outer space. Yes, maybe I should cut back on the coffee. 

A new study published in the Journal of Marketing which found shoppers who had a complimentary caffeinated coffee right before shopping ended up spending mor...

When Success Is Measured In Hate, We All Lose

One thing that right and left wing media personalities have in common: they are both desperate to be hated. Attracting the hate of their ideological opposites has become a sad metric for success. If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re not doing your job. The same mentality has entered into the world of business and entrepreneurship. This ideal of hate-seeking is toxic to our culture, but effective because we are falling for the trick over and over. But who really benefits by keeping us angry ...

Magazines Create Empathy That Can Change the World. Here’s How To Save Them.

“The print magazine is an antidote to information overload, a form of media that contains a finite amount of content, releasing readers from the laborious task of deciding what to consume in the limited spaces of time in a day.”

Magazines are my favorite media. I read an ode to the power of the printed word in magazines this week and it reminded me of all the things I love about them. The process of curating this email is a constant battle to avoid overload, and I find that magazines always h...

Why We Still Need Conferences and Convention Centers

Convention centers can be beautiful energizing places. They can also be sad lonely reminders of why business travel sometimes sucks. I have spent many hours inside convention centers as a speaker before they became one of the first big casualties of the pandemic. A Businessweek feature this week focused on the collective efforts of architects, city officials and event planners to imagine a richer future for these forgotten convention spaces. The events industry right now is filled with hope, whi...

How To Archive Yourself In the Digital Age

“I thought self-archiving could lead to self-actualization. I filled as many spaces as I could with information, whether it was on my blog, in Facebook albums, on Twitter, or on any of the many social media platforms I’ve used through the years. It was like collecting data on myself. But I also had an overall fear of letting go, of impermanence. I was so scared of forgetting pieces of myself—even pieces I longed to discard, like bad relationships and bad friendships and, I guess, other people in...