Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 72

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...

Flavor Changing Skittles And Other Fun Halloween Stories

Given next week is Halloween – I thought it fitting to share a few related stories this week. The first is about Skittles “Trick Plays” bag which features candies that do not taste like their colors, which is sure to frustrate some die-hard Skittles consumers. Last week I featured Snickers hunger bars and this week I came across these stories too: Goth wines for people who take Halloween way to seriously, Teal pumpkins to make Halloween safer for kids with allergies and a last minute costume...

The App That Lets You Brag About Disconnecting

As more experts suggest that we should all stop bragging about how many hours we work, this app from Ariana Huffington is timely as it rewards you for disconnecting from tech and social media. Given how common it is for people to seek validation for achievements (like people who post about working out or finishing a tough race), it will be interesting to see if this app might encourage more boasting about the ability to survive without your phone for blocks of time. The app will be released i...

Stop Selling Products & Services and Sell Projects Instead

This post from GlaxoSmithKline exec Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez really got me thinking about a new way of selling. Rather than focusing on products or experiences, this article argues that the future might belong to brands who excel at selling “projects.” He uses the case study of how Philips moved from selling medical devices to instead partnering with Westchester Medical Center to develop and launch the entire facility as an example. This is a great article to read and share with your team.

Rea...

Snickers Launches Plan To Sell Candy Bars Based On Emotions

Forget using tech and big data for personalization – Snickers has a better idea … just let people tell you how they are feeling. The new versions of their “hunger bar” (as they are now calling their product) which will come out in June 2018, branded along with the emotion that they might fit with (like Salty&Sweet for “Indecisive”). It’s a fun idea that might even work on a subconscious level you head toward the checkout, find a long line and pick up an Espresso-flavored Snickers bar just bec...

Nissan Will Make Its Electric Cars “Sing” To Protect Pedestrians

Electric cars are too quiet. For years, unsuspecting pedestrians accustomed to listening for cars would walk into the road in front of electric cars, unaware of their proximity. At the Tokyo Motor Show, Nissan proposed an interesting solution: they will make their new cars “sing.” As creators continue to innovate to make tech as human-friendly as possible – this move raises all sorts of sonic branding possibilities as cars may one day be imprinted not only with a “face” through their headligh...