Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 70
June 23, 2018
Backlash On World Cup Jersey Design Surprises Adidas. It Shouldn’t.
This week there have been no shortage of World Cup memes. Everything from Senegal manager Aliou Cissé becoming the tournament’s coolest man, to the early domination of Ronaldo. Yet the one meme so far that might offer the best business lesson is the justified worldwide ridicule Adidas is earning for their confusingly designed official jerseys. This is the “curse of knowledge.” Their team can’t see a problem like this because they have read that font many times. It’s obvious what the letters a...
June 16, 2018
SHRM 2018 and the Reinvention Of Human Resources
Toby Flenderson is not a popular guy.
A few years when I spoke at a previous SHRM event, Toby was one factor in a palpable sense of extreme frustration I felt from many of the people in my audience. The Office was still on the air and Toby (the HR character on the show) cast a long shadow over the profession of HR. Too many HR pros felt that they were missing a seat at the table, a sentiment my colleague Paresh Shah recently described perfectly.
Since then, there has been a slow but steady t...
June 14, 2018
How Brands Become Fixers Of Everything From Potholes To Fake News
Domino’s just started fixing potholes on roads, to help your pizza get delivered undisturbed. In response to news stories of kids getting fined by overzealous city officials for running lemonade stands without permits, Country Time Lemonade created a fund to pay their legal fees. Both are stunts from brands taking a short lived Brand Stand to try and become fixers of small problems. For brands, taking this role of a fixer could do wonders to inspire more loyalty. Sadly, in the cases of Domino...
June 13, 2018
Customers Are Not Always Right (And Sometimes Don’t Deserve Nice Things)
Yes, Elon Musk finally released his flame throwers to the consumer market … and people promptly began using them in totally inappropriate ways. It is a predictable side effect of our culture of Everyday Stardom that consumers behave badly … just because they can. This week, there were plenty of examples that maybe we don’t deserve all the nice things and technology that we have access to.
In France, students will be banned from using mobile phones in school. In China, one city created a slow...
June 11, 2018
How To Reinvent A Brand: Lessons From Kodak, Blackberry and Crayola
This week Crayola branched out in a new direction by launching its own line of colorful beauty products. In the same week, Blackberry continued their own quest to maintain relevance and resurrect their fading brand by announcing the KEY2 (a new phone featuring a full keyboard) and Kodak showed off the first photos taken on its relaunched Ektachrome 100 film. Each are legacy brands facing challenges on every level, from understanding shifting consumer needs to industry disruption from competit...
June 8, 2018
How Twitter Is Killing Our Culture (And Why We Probably Won’t Fix It)
Is Twitter useful anymore (or was it ever)?
Most of us who have been on the platform for some time have likely experienced a downward shift in its value. For me, the platform used to offer an interesting stream of real time commentary from friends and acquaintances. Over time it became a noisy flood of retweets and half formed opinions. The demise of Twitter into “the world’s most anarchic social media platform” is the topic explored in an article from WIRED contributor Felix Salmon this week...
June 5, 2018
Why Everyone Wants To Sell Everything As A Subscription
This week AirFrance became one of the first airlines to experiment with subscription pricing by announcing a new pre-paid travel product called Le Pass which allows frequent travelers to purchase pre-paid coupons to lock in pricing. A few days later, Mercedes-Benz followed BMW, Porsche and Cadillac by launching their own monthly all-inclusive subscription model, at a significantly lower rate ($1095 versus $2000 per month). The software industry also has increasingly converted most of their cu...
April 23, 2018
How To Sue A Robot And What The TED Conference Is Really Like
Should technology be a source for hope or fear? That was the question that seemed to emerge this week as I read several stories offering a recap from the TED Global conference as well as new initiatives in natural language search from Google and a legal debate about how and if people should be able to sue robots. As is often the case with big questions like this, there isn’t really a single answer. All that’s certain is the questions will get bigger and more urgent as time moves forward.
April 9, 2018
Extinct Animal Zoos, Ungendered Baby Names And How To Save Social Media
Social media is under attack and all of us are trying to figure out what to do about it. Should we use Facebook less like a newspaper and more like a telephone? Is the best solution for the manipulated outrage on Twitter to just to turn it all off? An Op-Ed in the NYTimes this week tackled that issue and shared a few interesting solutions for how we might yet survive this social apocalypse without resorting to deleting our friendships along with the noise. Other stories this week explore whet...
April 2, 2018
Selfie Medicine, Luxury Marketing And How To Get Paid To Watch Netflix
This week my story picks range from exploring the future of luxury marketing and healthcare to addictive game design to the world of people who are paid to watch Netflix content. I have to admit, the one about the Netflix content taggers did intrigue me – as I never really thought about how all of those relevant suggestions from the service might actually have humans behind them organizing the content instead of just algorithms. It is somehow comforting to think that when the robots take all...
