Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 67

Gender At The Olympics, Diesel Sells Fake Products and Why Apple’s Homepod Is A Bad Buy

The value of branding was questioned in a few stories this week, including one of a perfume store selling scents without the “noise” of marketing or labels and retailer Diesel launching its own store selling knockoffs. Other stories this week feature a fascinating data analysis of what might happen if women and men could compete against one another at the Olympics and L.L. Bean’s new plans to create connected boots (and whether their consumers will go for it). I hope you enjoy the stories thi...

The Disruption Issue: Norway’s Olympic Curling Pants, Saudi Solar And Soap Fetishes

This week disruption was the theme in multiple stories featuring everything  from new ASMR videos, to rocket launches to more than one story warning about the downside of technology. The stories remind us that regardless of whether we call these changes disruption or evolution, most of them don’t help everyone equally. There are winners and losers … and as you’ll see in several stories this week, the losers will be heard eventually.

The Forgotten Consequences Of The Sharing Economy

The devast...

Why Are Icelanders So Creative? Hint – It’s Not Their Environment

The power of empathy was a big theme this week, in stories from Amnesty International and a “robotherapy” chatbot. Both look at new and interesting ways for us to better understand one another and get help when we most need it.

New Survey Reveals Multiple Reasons Why Icelanders Are So Creative

A new published study finds several reasons for a current boom in Icelandic creativity. An educational shift 20 years ago to value creativity more highly played a large part. A less appreciated reason a...

Spy Testing, Open Source Furniture and How To Find A Pet That Likes Your Music

I spent the early part of this past week thinking a lot about transformation as I spoke at the SocialMedia.org Winter Meeting in front of a group of strategists running social media for large brands. The theme, if there was one, seemed to be how to inspire more people around us (and especially our leaders!) to embrace disruption. Sharing new ideas like the ones featured in this newsletter every week is a good start. I hope you enjoy these selections.

Spotify Helps You Adopt A Pet That Likes T...

Smog Tower, Sh*Thole Namibia, Chilean Fog Beer And How Kids See Gender Identity

New Study Finds That Kids Are More Flexible About Gender Identity

One of the trends my team and I uncovered and wrote about this year in Non-Obvious was “Ungendered” – a term that describes how our shifting definitions of traditional gender roles are leading some to reject the notion of gender completely. A new study released this week from Vanderbilt University studied children’s reactions to a genderless robot character on the Amazon show Annedroids and its conflict about whether to call it...

7 Exciting Trends To Watch From CES 2018

In the first years of publishing my annual trend report, I used to wait until early in the year just so I could go to CES and incorporate some of the ideas and products from the show into my research. With the accelerated schedule of getting the report out by December, I end up forecasting more of what I might see and then waiting until the show to make the connections.

This week in the lead up to the show, my team and I reviewed many press announcements, media articles and videos to prepare...

The Best Business Books Of 2017 | Non-Obvious Book Award Winners

What were the best business books of 2017?

For my team, trying to answer this question is a year long obsession that takes us through several hundred books as part of our annual research into trends and new ideas to fuel the predictions in our own book that comes out every December all about trends.

Today I’m happy to announce our selections for the Non-Obvious Business Book Awards – including 15 Long List selections, another 15 Short List selections and finally five category winners.

Here’s...

What I Learned By Predicting Trends For 8 Years (And Almost Becoming A Futurist)

I have often resisted describing myself as a futurist.

To me, a futurist was someone who offered an ambitious prediction of the far future — usually focusing on things like energy produced by bio luminescent bacteria or 3D printed houses. Instead, I have spent close to the past decade predicting the near future.

Every year, my Non-Obvious Trend Report features 15 new predictions for the year ahead along with an action guide on how to use the trends. For the first few years, I shied away fro...

The Ad Council Helps Connect Creative Marketing Pros With Nonprofits

I admit that despite my many years working in marketing and advertising I have never been lucky enough to work on an Ad Council pro bono campaign, but have routinely admired them. Now they have teamed up with Taproot to launch a wonderful site designed to help nonprofits access free professional support from a variety of marketing professionals with different skills. Projects currently available include everything from helping to design websites to providing voice over services. It’s a great...

A Store With Nothing To Sell Helps You Reclaim Your Online Privacy

Sometimes it takes a blend of art and experience in order to bring an idea more powerfully to life. At the Glass Door retail installation in central London, the idea is that people can experience their own digital footprint through immersive tools – like a face scanner that pulls up publicly available photos of you, or an art installation called Where The F**k was I? that shows an artists location over one year as tracked by his iPhone. At the end of the experience, visitors get a “Data Detox...