15 2025 July
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Afrofuturism by Kevin M. Strait and Kinshasha Holman Conwill
“There are Black people in the future.” That’s the brilliant reminder on the back cover of this book I recall reading and selecting for our...
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02 2025 May
Why the Nike Backlash May Be Just the Beginning
When Jennifer and I wrote Beyond Diversity, one of the first things we talked about was blind spots. We knew that there would be things we...
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24 2024 June
What If Award Winning Ads from Cannes Became Open Source for Anyone to Use?
This week is the Cannes Creative Festival and so there are plenty of the usual healthy jokes about Cannes being a yacht-party fueled satire of itself....
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05 2024 April
The Disturbing Truth About How Trader Joe’s Sources New Products
Trader Joe’s doesn’t seem like an evil brand. Their personality-driven backstory offers an irresistible underdog mentality that drives rabid brand fans who celebrate every new product arrival. Unfortunately,...
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15 2024 March
Inside the Ban on TikTok and Why It Could Work
In general, the idea of banning something that kids really want to do or use hardly ever works. Betting against the ingenuity of young minds...
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05 2024 March
Ever Wonder Why Certain Flavors Of Chips Are Sold In Some Countries and Not Others? Inside The Secretive World Of Flavor Dust …
If you have ever been to another region of the world and been curious about how they ended up with the various flavors of crisps...
Read Now21 2023 December
What Three Beers Can Teach You About Reinventing Your Marketing
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...
Read Now30 2022 December
The Most Popular Non-Obvious Stories of 2022 (Based On Reader Feedback)
Based on this combination of quantitative and qualitative data, here is a partial list of some of the most popular stories of the year, based on what my readers shared.
Read Now22 2020 July
Trader Joe’s and the Slow Death of Brand Personality
Update – Two weeks after this post was originally published, Trader Joe’s issued a new statement sharing that they do not consider these brand names...
Read Now17 2020 July
How Afrofuturists Think Different and Why the Questions They Ask Matter
“Futurists labor over questions about the nature of Android consciousness and empathy. Afrofuturists ask how race might be wired into Android consciousness and whether the...
Read Now26 2019 December
5 Non-Obvious Megatrends Changing Our World In 2020
For the past ten years I have gone through an annual ritual of publishing a book about trends that describe our shifting culture and business...
Read Now26 2019 November
Inside India’s First Brand For Curly Haired Women
India has some baggage when it comes to women with curly hair: “The Indian ideal for beauty prizes long, straight hair. For the most part,...
Read Now23 2017 October
How Diverse Are US Newsrooms? Not Very …
In this data visualization, the shift in diversity of both race and gender in newsroom staff and leadership across the country is analyzed with some...
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