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The Mask That Displays Your Emotions In Real Time

Rather than wearing your emotions on your sleeve, a new product called the Hyperface lets you wear them on your face. The idea from London-based designer Eun Kyung Shin is to use a visor-like headset to create a new visual method for communications where we could understand each other more deeply without depending on emotional … Read more

Books Are Getting “Swearier” And This Is What It Means …

Apparently the shift towards swear words in book titles and content has not gone unnoticed by researchers. As Cory Doctorow notes in this article: “books are getting swearier and [researchers concluded] that this is a bellwether for a growth in the value of individualism.” I have definitely noticed this shift in non-fiction books (The Subtle … Read more

How “The Backscratchers” Are Reinventing The Agency Model

Back when I worked in the agency world, I remember the angst every time an unreasonable demand came in from a client without a “proper” brief. Rather than try to change this sad reality of last minute requests (or complain about it behind the client’s back), “The Backscratchers” agency have created a model that embraces … Read more

Fender Uses eLearning To Help Guitarists Not Give Up So Easily

For anyone who has ever aspired to play the guitar, taken a few lessons and then given up … Fender has a new solution to try and keep your passion for the guitar alive. In a perfectly strategic new move, the brand is launching an eLearning platform with videos to help people more easily learn … Read more

New Mortgage For Millennials Offers Free Avocado Toast (Seriously)

Sure it is easy to poke fun at those quirky hipsters and their strange dietary choices but SoFi Mortgages is one brand taking a totally different approach. They are offering a new mortgage which comes with a month’s worth of avocado toast home delivered (with a choice of regular or gluten-free bread.  Why avocado toast? The simple … Read more

Netflix Lets Kids Choose Their Own Adventure In New Episode

What if you could craft your own story in a television episode? Netflix is experimenting with letting kids do exactly that in a new episode of The Adventures of Puss in Boots by giving them half a dozen choices in the episode that each send the story in a different direction. It’s a bold experiment … Read more

The Surprising Brand That Won Big At Cannes

The most famous portraits in history are all painted from the torso up. That was the interesting insight from Ogilvy that led to this campaign for shoe polish brand Kiwi which recently won big at the Cannes festival. By commissioning artists to draw the bottom half of famous paintings like the Mona Lisa – this … Read more

Brazilian Publisher Offers On-Demand Clever Captions For Your Selfies

Sometimes it is hard to pick the perfect caption for your selfie, but Brazilian publisher Leya has a solution to help … and introduce you to some of their newest authors in the process. The brand launched a chatbot that will ask you about your photo and then suggest a quote from one of their … Read more

Love IKEA? Now Your House Can Smell Like It

What do cinnamon buns, lingonberries and assemble-yourself-bookcases smell like? IKEA … and soon you can bring that smell home in a fragrance developed by independent Swedish fragrance creator Byredo. The idea is an interesting exploration of how broadly a brand experience could go. Given the power of smell to evoke memory, something like this could … Read more

How To Build Trust In An Era Of Desperate Truth Seeking Consumers

It is hard to get away from the feeling that we are being manipulated all the time. This week there were plenty of new stories of divisive characters losing their audience, brands trying new ways to be more truthful, and talk show host John Oliver trying to define reality itself. The theme this week is the … Read more

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#1 WSJ & USA Today Bestselling Author

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.

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