Roger Dooley: Welcome to the Brainfluence Podcast. I’m Roger Dooley. Our guest this week is Rohit Bhargava. He’s an idea curator, storyteller, advertising expert and the founding father of The Non Obvious Company. Previously, he spent over 15 years superior digital and business plan for global brands at Leo Burnett and Ogilvy.
He’s a Professor of Marketing and Storytelling at Georgetown University and a Wall Street Journal Best Selling Author of five business books. Rohit’s newest unencumber is the 2018 variation of Non Obvious: How to Predict Trends and Win the Future. Welcome to the show, Rohit. Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I spend a lot of time and I read a large number of work from futurists and the theories that they’ve about how the arena is going to be in 2050 are just charming stuff.
Partial science fiction, but partial like really appealing. For me, I didn’t feel like that defined what I do due to the fact I spend a large number of time looking at what’s taking place at this time. Even though I wrote a book about trends and I rewrite it and update it each year, the horizon is mainly a year and so I look at what are the hot trends for this year and what’s happening at this time that’s going to speed up, which is basically how we look at why the trends are important at this time. Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, I think that numerous times when we hear about trends, particularly at the beginning of any year, you read these articles saying five trends that are going to change retail and trend number 1 can be Facebook. It’s simply so idiotic because Facebook is not a trend, it’s a platform that exists and 3D printing is not a trend, it’s technology that exists and synthetic intelligence.
I mean, none of those things are trends due to the fact there’s no path to that. It’s just something that exists and it’s important and it’s going to be more essential. Roger Dooley: Mm hmm affirmative. Yep. How did you know if a trend is real or maybe you don’t?I don’t know, but let me give you a private example from my own history and maybe this is anything you focus on a non trend and a generation. It’s some thing when I, I concept I noticed a trend and it cost my business a fair sum of money.
About 30 years ago, each person was talking about home automation and smart houses. People’s existence were going to vary, home theaters were just coming into vogue, the builder’s arrangement launched a huge standards task, and firms like GE, who at that point was pretty much regarded for their foresight, they were jumping in with both feet, so we started a paper called Electronic House that was part of an extended term approach to market products in that sector. We succeeded in fitting the only real publication in that enterprise and, imagine it or not, it’s still being published today by the agency we sold it to, but the market that we idea was on the verge of exploding, and a large number of people thought that it was on the verge of exploding just a year or two down the road, took about 30 years to broaden. It’s only in the last year or two. What did that in was a mixture of product cost and complexity and really not that much demand.
There wasn’t a lot on the pull side to make it happen, but now with the Alexa and some of the other home assistant type product and with instant, those issues are being addressed, both cost and complexity. Looking back, should we have looked at that with type of a unique lens to say okay, a large number of people are speaking about it, but it’s unlikely to happen?Rohit Bhargava: As you accurately diagnosed, like it’s really hard to inform. Right?One of the things I examine when it comes to predicting what’s a trend and what isn’t, is there, I mean, searching enough at the environment around anything and am I looking enough across industries because numerous times when we see whatever thing that we predict is a trend, it’s just going down in one place. In your example, you may need seen all of these gadgets for smart homes, but nothing else was smart. Like, we didn’t have smart phones, we didn’t have smart cars, we didn’t have the surroundings around it. We didn’t have home Wi Fi long ago then and so the things that a sensible home would have needed to be exploding weren’t quite there yet.
I think a large number of times, that’s what happens when we examine things that we think might be trends. We look in one space due to the fact that’s the gap we know and we expect, oh, here’s a trend. It’s totally going to vary every little thing when it’s just happening in that one space and never across industries in a big, big way. Roger Dooley: Right. Good point. At the time, cars tended to be loads smarter than homes, even those days, but what the purpose of these tasks are to form of create the infrastructure.
Wi Fi was not essentially a reality at that time, but the purpose then was to create a cabling infrastructure and I think where the rubber didn’t hit the line was the cost of that infrastructure ended up just being greater than clients desired to pay and, as a result, one of the most usability issues never got addressed due to the fact nobody wanted to even installation the technology. Had the tech been inexpensive, maybe then you would have seen innovative people arising with much better user interfaces, but didn’t happen. Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, I think for me the very first thing I had to alter in my mindset and the very first thing I would encourage anyone to alter is this idea, which I think is a myth, that trends can be noticed because I don’t think trends are noticed, identical to I don’t think looking at flour, eggs, and sugar on a shelf is the same thing as a cake. You need to turn it into whatever, so ideas can be noticed and that’s in reality the key, becoming a collector and a spotter of ideas, interesting ideas. One of the first things I teach people is how do you become the type of individual that forever saves these interesting ideas after which teach them how to spot patterns between those ideas in order that they can start to identify what trends are. Your analogy of teach a man to fish, I mean, it’s really what I consider.
I’m not a kind of those that believes that I’m the futurist and I’m the just one that are supposed to be able to are expecting trends and also you should pay me if you are looking to know what the trends are. That’s not my attitude. I believe that any of us can learn how to do that if we just have a greater method for things that we type of take as a right. Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, so among the many behaviors that I try to teach people is to have better assets of information and by better I don’t mean more authoritative always, I mean more diverse due to the fact the issue at this time with all the algorithms and fake news and all of these items we’re surrounded by as data is that there’s a huge affirmation bias within it. Smart people type of know that, but they don’t really know how to find outside of it due to the fact, at the top of the day, as soon as you go surfing to your computer and it knows who you are, that algorithms already began and you kind of can’t get out of it. I mean, whether or not you log out, you continue to have cookies saved and you still have sure things on your desktop which are funneling certain varieties of data.
Roger Dooley: Mm hmm affirmative. Yeah. Are there trends of different scales?I’m sure the answer needs to be yes. In particular, I wonder about trends that only affect specific areas or topics that aren’t going to be in your book or the company press. They’re too exact.
In fact, a chum of mine, Carrie Vanston, here in Austin, co authored a book back in 2011. I’ll read you the title. It’s a long title, Minitrends: How Innovators and Entrepreneurs Discover and Profit From Business and Technology Trends: Between Megatrends and Microtrends Lie Minitrends, Emerging Business Opportunities in the New Economy. Now, that’s a mouthful for a book title, but I think just the title itself raises the purpose that there are trends of a variety scales and I assume that if you’re in the plumbing industry, there are trends there. If you are making disposable diapers, there’s trends in that market and so forth and Austin has trends that aren’t an identical as Portland or Tokyo. Do you purchase into that theory?How do you expand on that?Rohit Bhargava: One thing that you simply probably find out about my character, Roger, is I’m not the one that goes on a diet after which yells at somebody else for eating a donut.
You know what I mean?I’m not the man who’s going to inform someone they shouldn’t describe a trend in a undeniable way. Now, there are things that are taking place in a certain region that aren’t happening in other places. When I talk about trends, I don’t really focus on that form of trend, so I don’t do industry trends, I do trends on probably, as your friend would describe it, a more macro level, …Rohit Bhargava: … but I apply them to micro levels. Oftentimes what I’ll do is I’ll say, well here’s a macrotrend that’s going down over here and over here and over here, and if you’re in healthcare, here’s why it matters for you. That’s type of my mind-set, which is to go broader because a large number of times what finally ends up going down is I, in the method of doing the analysis for the trends and when my team’s collecting some of these ideas and things, we’ll find lots and lots of microtrends. The challenge is to lift your wondering to put those into some sort of a much bigger picture.
Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, the Haystack Method was type of my analogy for describing the technique that I started to use. It was in accordance with this cliche of trying in finding a needle in a haystack and really flipping it around and saying that the essential thing about curating trends or ideas is not locating a needle in a haystack, but spending enough time gathering enough hay, for you to put your individual needle in the middle of it. The Haystack Method has five phases, versus just gathering, so saving appealing ideas and the second is beginning to aggregate those ideas, so curating them into clusters. The third is raising your wondering, so we were just kind of speaking about that. Instead of microtrends, like it elevates to bigger ideas. The fourth phase is naming and I’m a brand method guy and I’ve spent my whole career in marketing.
I spend numerous time figuring out like what am I going to name these trends, so that the tips behind them stick?Then, the last phase is proving and that’s really where we do a lot more research. We validate, we do interviews, and we you have to be really, really brutal about trying out no matter if this truly is deserving of being among the many 15 trends that we put out each year. Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, I do. I mean, I use a group of different things, I mean, so I use a mix of physical ways, so I’m ripping things out of magazine and such things as that, but I also use a couple of virtual tools. Every week I put out a weekly e-newsletter that just curates the right, most interesting thoughts of the week, and I use Feedly to pass through a gaggle of alternative RSS feeds and then I use an app called Pocket to save lots of those. Then, I translate those into the weekly e-newsletter.
There’s a combination of digital tools and then there’s a very visual method for like how I read books with little coloured tabs and such things as that. I try to, in the book and also online, just share a bunch of photos of how that procedure works for me. I also, for the first time this year, I did a time lapse video of how this curation kind of works. That was really really … I did it on the LinkedIn and I’ll make sure you have the good stuff for your show. Roger Dooley: Mm hmm affirmative. It’s funny that we both use Pocket.
I find it’s such a useful tool due to the fact, well, it’s sort of like the first law of productiveness is don’t interrupt what you’re doing just due to the fact you’re distracted by some most likely appealing piece of content, but you discover that stuff and also you don’t want to just ignore it and neglect it. That really enables you to save it and so you can really fast review it later. If it turned out to be lifeless, well you could delete it and differently you may save it, but you may do it on your time, when you’re able to start reviewing some content material, not once you’re in the midst of a assignment or whatever. That’s an excellent tool and it’s free. Now, you’ve got an idea of how to go trend fishing, so to chat.
Let’s talk about one of the crucial trends in the newest variant of Non Obvious and especially with a focal point on advertising and marketing. What about over concentrated on. It appears like marketers are type of salivating at the chance of personally targeting consumers in line with their behaviors, their pursuits, and now even maybe their character. There are a couple of firms that claim to be able to determine an individual’s personality by either their solutions to some questions or examining their social media posts. It seems like targeting is form of the way forward for marketing. What’s over focused on?Rohit Bhargava: Over targeting was really, I mean, it’s a good example of the approach to Non Obvious wondering, right, because in the area of all and sundry speaking about focused on and personalization and how to customize every thing that you do in advertising, this was really an concept describing how we could be doing a bit too much of that.
We might be leaving profitable consumers on the table due to the fact we’re too super curious about trying to hit an analogous people over and another time or doing a degree of personalization that truly isn’t working. I share the tale, like one of the thoughts at first of the bankruptcy is ready how I happened to be looking for a bow tie for once because I had to wear one to an event. I’m not a bow tie or any type of tie events wearer, so this was really type of a one time acquire for me. I just wanted something a little various for this one event. I went online and I search for bow ties and being a last minute consumer, for sure, I didn’t find anything that I could get in time, so I physically went to a store domestically.
I bought my bow tie, I went to my event. For six weeks after that, I got retargeting ads for bow ties sent to me by all of these online agents who should have thought oh, this guy’s going to be an excellent bow tie client for us. We better get him back. He put a bow tie into his searching cart and he didn’t take a look at. They’re starting to do all their remarketing and all their algorithms. They’re spending all of this money to try and get me to click or the impression based money and it’s just never going to work.
I started pondering at that point, is that this world of adverstalking as I called it due to the fact I felt like I was being stalked by the ads, is that truly the best we can do and is that really the right way to do virtual promoting?I know that retargeting works and I know the numbers. I get it. I know there’s a reason they’re doing that, but at the end of the day, the philosophy of it just seems flawed in a couple of various ways because they’re concentrated on the incorrect person. They don’t in reality know anything about me apart that I happen to put a bow tie in my shopping cart once and that’s not enough. We should have the ability to do better than that. Roger Dooley: Yeah, I can top that story.
At least, chances are you’ll think that a bow tie buyer would prefer to have a few styles and in the event that they saw an enchanting one which they didn’t own anything identical, they might buy it, but a few weeks ago I bought a elaborate shower head. Now, a shower head is form of a one time purchase unless you’re going to change all the showers in your house or whatever thing like that. Since that point, I’ve been getting ads, I’ve been getting emails. It’s crazy, when I truly purchase the product, as a matter of fact, I’m being retargeted by those channels, by a similar company that sold me the product. I can perceive somebody else saying, okay, well we don’t know if you bought it or not, so we’re going to target them.
He just looked at it on our site, but there is a greater way to do it. Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, and I think there is also this improper assumption, I mean, that we know precisely who our clientele are. I mean, a superb example of a brand that’s totally shifted it’s Harley Davidson. Right?I mean, they for years and years and years, their target client was a center aged guy and now one in their quickest becoming segments are women because they uncovered that women are half the market and they’d like to ride bikes, too. There was an alternate example I found that I wrote about of a company called Blu Homes, which make custom homes.
They had these really nice, modern designs and that they had a no haggle kind of policy, which individuals love, so the price was the cost. They conception that their viewers would be sort of 30 whatever thing year old, urban, home buyers. They found that as a substitute their audience was what they called “green grandmas. ” It totally modified the way that that they had to do their marketing due to the fact they found that this was really attractive for somebody who was form of downsizing to their next home. Rohit Bhargava: This one’s very close to my historical past.
I mean, I’ve been writing about storytelling for 10 years, since my first book, and this is all concerning the power of telling the tale behind why your agency or why your product exists, so it’s not just tell an outstanding story as a pitch, it’s tell the backstory. Tell the historical past. Go backwards. Share your background and tell people why this is truly effective and fascinating. There’s some great examples of that that I completely love. I mean, this past year, last year really, Grey Advertising did this attractive campaign where they renamed the whole agency after its founders.
If you consider it, in the advertising industry, most ad organizations are named after the people who based them. Right?I mean Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Saatchi and Saatchi, I mean there are … Jay Tinalutee. I mean, they’re all named after the founder. Grey was named after the wallpaper in the office and the reason for it’s due to the fact the founders were both Jewish and had Jewish sounding names. When they were headquartered in 1917, it was a liability to be Jewish and so they named their agency after the wallpaper.
A hundred years later, to rejoice the anniversary, Grey Advertising in London modified the name of the agency for 100 days to Valenstein and Fatt, which were the founder’s names. It was such a powerful way to tell this founder story and differentiate this agency from any other agency and provide an explanation for why they were named after the wallpaper. That form of story, it generates numerous attention because it’s appealing and it doesn’t need to be a technique only utilized by brands that are 100 years old. I mean, this can be utilized by even newer corporations since it brings to life the reason you exist. Roger Dooley: Yeah, it’s great since it’s an emotional story, too.
I think it really ties into an emotion that people can feel and empathize with, so yeah, that’s great. Oddly enough, I knew of a direct advertising agency a long time back that, for an analogous reason, they picked a very WASPy special’s name as the name of the agency and actually, this person was even listed, who is completely non existent, was listed on their stationery and so on. When I client wanted to talk to him, oh, well he’s traveling or he’s out of the country. They always had a good excuse. Then, at last, after a period of years, they even published a death declaration for him and that they retired him in that way.
Sorry to note the passing of something his name was, so it put that specific thing to rest, but it was really amusing that they were able to pull that off, too. As far as I know, nobody ever really called them on it or uncovered it. Maybe they weren’t an enormous agency, but even so it was funny. Rohit Bhargava: I think there are, sometimes there’s relationships between the trends and there’s two in specific that I think are linked, but really essential. One is whatever thing I call truthing, which was the idea that we are increasingly seeking the reality behind all this fake media that we see by trusting the those that we know or the circumstances that we have got first hand experience with. If you suspect a couple of customer who is inclined to be skeptical already after which now, in the media climate today, they’re even more skeptical, what are they going to trust?They’re going to trust studies and real things that they’ve interacted with, so every marketer is speaking about stories.
How do we create brand reviews, how do we be more experiential?Right?One of the reasons why that’s so important is because that’s what individuals are trusting more than anything they see almost. The other trend that’s related to it truly is something I call manipulated outrage and I think the world is filled with that right now where we are being manipulated to be angry. It’s a very appealing cultural phenomenon and it’s not just in the US. Digging into it is a desirable exercise for any of your listeners who are really interested in human conduct. Right. I mean, the behavioral analysis behind this concept of why we feel outrage and how outrage, every so often, has become an identification that people describe themselves as having.
What happens to that patron, that one who appears like it’s their job to be outraged?Can they ever be happy due to the fact now that’s become a part of their identity to be outraged?That’s really interesting if you think about it because nobody would have described themselves like that I think five years ago. Rohit Bhargava: Well, there’s numerous stuff you can do if you recognize that anyone is prone to be outraged. For example, you may advertise a product as the choice to something that outrages people. High fructose corn syrup is an effective example, right?There’s numerous people that are really ticked off about high fructose corn syrup and so a majority of these marketers in the food marketing realm are staying far clear of high fructose corn syrup or even calling basically an identical substance anything else just to avoid that term due to the fact they know it’s so loaded. You think about the enterprise model behind media and how, you know, I think there has been some charming data from cable news programming since Trump became President saying that Fox News, CNN. MSNBC, all of them had double digits ratings growth in the second a part of 2017 and that’s what they’re promoting.
I mean, on both sides. This is not a partisan thing. I mean, both varieties of networks, anything their biases are, are basically promoting outrage, right?They’re either selling outrage about people that are towards the President or they’re selling outrage for individuals who are for the President, but it’s all outrage. Rohit Bhargava: I have more than that basically, but among the many things that I really believe in is a level of transparency and I’ve been doing this now for eight years, so if you do the math, 15 trends a year times eight, I mean, that’s greater than a hundred trends. Not each of them has panned out the best way that I would have hoped, but from a transparency perspective, at the tip of each book and, in specific, at the tip of this new 2018 edition, there’s a 40 page appendix. In the appendix is a recap of every single trend, together with a grade, a rating for how that trend did through the years based on not just what I think, but in addition additional research that my team has done, those that we’ve spoken to.
Some of the trends that are older, like six or seven years old, as you may think about, have not done all that crazy well. Some of them were, they’re describing micro ideas. I mean, I be aware I did one that I theory was such a superb way of describing whatever thing that was in keeping with this concept of like there are an increasing number of brands doing like … I don’t know if you be aware this, but it was an eye fixed company that did like the one second film pageant and folks would submit a one second film. That was like, that was the competitors. I checked out all of these like short …This was the time when Vine videos were starting up and these like super short videos. I describe all of these as pointillist filmmaking.
It was in line with pointillist portray and that was form of how it was titled. It was like, you know, it was a clever way of describing what was going down, but two years later, that was kind of gone. I mean, Vine went away and …Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, look, I mean, hey I’m like any one who tries to predict the longer term, like I’m tempted to, you recognize, say when someone’s asked me about any trends, I’ll either say yeah, it came true, or not yet. I mean, those are the straightforward solutions, right, but being more self vital and saying look, we concept this was going to be big and it wasn’t and therefore this grade has a C minus, or anything we grade it at, that’s a level of mirrored image that I think people have really appreciated year after year during this report due to the fact they know that it’s not in response to BS, it’s not in keeping with us looking to say look, we’re promoting virtual promoting, so what’s the recent trend for 2018?Digital advertising. You know, like … duh.
At least it’s not self serving in that way. This is in accordance with what’s in fact taking place accessible. It’s based on lots of interviews and analyzing and analysis and real data and it’s useful because it’s not biased that way.
