Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 84
February 12, 2016
Non-Obvious Insights #1 | Grammys Get GoPros, Amazon In Retail And Diet Coke’s Bold Experiment
This was a big week in marketing, as the Super Bowl shined a spotlight on the best and worst of advertising (read my recap here) and there were big announcements on everything from Diet Coke’s bold reimagining of bottle design, to Amazon’s retail ambitions that are shaking up an entire industry. In this weeks issue of Non-Obvious Insights, I’ll share these stories as well as what they might mean for the future of business itself. I hope you enjoy this new weekly series on the Influential Mark...
Grammys Get GoPros, Amazon In Retail And Diet Coke’s Bold Experiment | Non-Obvious Insights #1
This was a big week in marketing, as the Super Bowl shined a spotlight on the best and worst of advertising (read my recap here) and there were big announcements on everything from Diet Coke’s bold reimagining of bottle design, to Amazon’s retail ambitions that are shaking up an entire industry. In this weeks issue of Non-Obvious Insights, I’ll share these stories as well as what they might mean for the future of business itself. I hope you enjoy this new weekly series on the Influential Mark...
February 8, 2016
The Best And Worst Of Super Bowl 2016 Marketing Strategy
I’m supposed to listen to people.
As a marketer, I have read thousands of pages of consumer studies and surveys. I have spenttime on stage in front of thousands more trying to share insights they want to hear. Super Bowl Sunday, however, is the one day of the year when I stop listening to people … particularly when it comes to what they think about Super Bowl advertisements. For the fifth year in a row, I put together my roundup of the best and worst marketing strategy from the game and for t...
October 21, 2015
The Powerful Trend That Explains Why We Love Back To The Future
“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”
Who doesn’t remember that bold prediction and iconic line from Doc Brown in the 80s classic film trilogy Back To The Future? Today approximately half of us are disappointed that we don’t yet have flying cars, while the other half is thrilled that someone actually decided to build a hover board for real.
Today’s date is October 21, 2015 – the original date of the “future” from the movies. It’s all anyone seems to be able to talk about today, for...
August 19, 2015
The Death Of Gender (And What It Means For Marketing)
There are plenty of signs that the way we have typically described gender may be dying before our very eyes.
In Austria last year, the winner of Eurovision’s popular song contest was a 26 year old drag queen with a beard named Conchita Wurst. Earlier this year, Sweden officially became the first country to add a gender neutral pronoun to its official dictionary. At the same time, Facebook expanded their already broad 58 gender options to now allow a custom unlimited field for users to designa...
July 16, 2015
The 5 Worst Habits Of Selfish Brands
Do you know a selfish brand?
Most of us do. We encounter them constantly – trying to promote their latest and greatest product. Their ads seek to interrupt us and every interaction is clearly only focused on either closing a deal or collecting our information for their database. They think in terms of short term revenue instead of long term value. They look at customers are only a necessity on their way to making a profit. And they make the world a worse place.
The good news is consumers have...
June 23, 2015
How Amazon Might Accidentally Kill Creativity
I rely on books.
As an author of five books, I believe in the power of them and as a trend curator and University Professor I consume many of them. I buy several new non-fiction books a week and often invest my time and attention in reading them and learning from them.
What I don’t do is read most of them cover to cover.
Yet some of the most lasting ideas that I get from books come from reading them in bursts. I consume books and ideas the same way travelers consume frequent flier miles – as...
June 16, 2015
How Reverse Retail Is Changing The Way We Buy
About two years ago, there was a single word that could strike fear into the heart of any retail brand executive – “showrooming.” The term popularized the increasingly common shopping behaviour from consumers of going into a physical store to try out and test a product before going online (often to an ecommerce only retailer like Amazon) and completing their purpose.
Was showrooming going to destroy the retail business?
This was one of the main questions speakers tackled at the National Retai...
June 9, 2015
A Short And Hopeful History Of Social Media
Social media has always been the home of meaningless indignation.
What do you do when you’re angry about something no one else cares about? Share it on social media. So as we started to each find our own voices on a platform that could reach micro-audiences, the easy thing to do was to use it as a place for venting. Flight delays, rude waiters, critiquing the latest episode of our favorite TV show were all common topics.
No one reallycared, but that was ok because hardly anyonewas really payi...
April 28, 2015
5 Lessons From Shockingly Honest Marketing Campaigns
Robert Townsend is one of the most underappreciated leaders in history.
He is not a household business name like Steve Jobs or Jack Welch. He didn’t lead an organization into making products to change the world. In fact, many of the employees that now work at the company he once led have probably never even heard his name.
Yet he was responsible for one of the boldest and most enduring marketing campaigns and business strategies of the 21st Century. In a world where brands seem to change mark...
