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This week Wendy’s unintentionally stirred up some trouble as headlines popped up online that the fast-food chain was testing “surge pricing” similar to Uber where they would charge more for food when demand was highest. The chain quickly backtracked with the relatively bone-headed explanation that they were actually using it to offer “discounts during slower … Read more
Boomers love wine, but that may not be enough to keep it flying high. A new report of sales figures from 2023 shows that spirits outsold wine for the first time in 45 years. Combined with a story I shared recently about how Gen Z is not drinking as much alcohol as previous generations, it seems … Read more
Welcome to a case study on why facial scanning is a bad idea. Supermarkets in the UK have been experimenting for the past year with technology that estimates the age of shoppers by scanning their faces at checkout. Apparently “Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Co-op have already successfully trialed the technology which allowed anyone that is estimated to … Read more
The 90s were a decade for grunge music and inventive beverages. The Orbitz was a soft drink described rather unappetizingly as “a lava lamp you could drink” and featured floating sugary chunks of tapioca in a more disgusting precursor to the Boba tea craze. While this concept of floating chunks of something in a drink … Read more
Beer is a category that has long been defined by the tastes great less filling debate. As a result, it’s easy to think that disruption would be nearly impossible to achieve through product alone. In the last several weeks, I’ve discovered several new product examples that the opposite is true. I’m a beer drinker. I’m … Read more
There’s a story I used to tell in my marketing keynotes about the early popularity of cinnamon. Spice traders hundreds of years ago, wanted to inflate the price they could charge for cinnamon so they created an elaborate story about a fierce bird known as the cinnamologus that had to be tamed in order to … Read more
Listening to someone crunchily eating Doritos is probably high on many lists of annoying behavior but imagine how much worse it must be to listen to the crunching in a headset while playing against a Dorito-eating opponent in a video game. In a beautiful example of knowing their audience, Doritos commissioned an AI company to quantify … Read more
A list of the world’s hottest peppers before 2023 includes some scary names. The Carolina Reaper. The Ghost Pepper. The Trinidad Scorpion. The Infinity Chili. Those are respectable, intimidating names for peppers that can melt your face starting with your taste buds. Apparently this year for the first time since 2017, there is a new pepper that … Read more
“Think of Fat Bear Week as a March Madness meets Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.” That’s the way one article describes the annual habits of 12 brown bears in southwest Alaska’s remote Katmai National Park and Preserve who will spend the next week gorging on about 40 salmon a day as they prepare for … Read more
In case you’re wondering who to blame for the popularity of disposable water bottles and the environmental catastrophe they have fueled – you could start with Perrier, the brand that first launched the craze in 1978 with a huge advertising campaign in the US. But reducing it down to a single villain brand wouldn’t tell … Read more
Non-Obvious Thinking is my latest book about the 4 secrets of becoming a non-obvious thinker - relesaed 10/01/2024.
Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company and the 3-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of ten books.
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In addition to Non-Obvious Thinking, Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.
