The Non-Obvious Megatrends that will affect our ability to deliver a stand out customer experience in the coming years – Interview with Rohit Bhargava

January 20, 2020

Today’s interview is with Rohit Bhargava, a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company, and the author of six best selling business books including the Wall Street Journal best seller Non-Obvious. Rohit joins me today to talk about his new book: Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future, what he’s learnt about trends over the last ten years and what we should be focusing in the coming years if we want to improve the service and experience that we deliver.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – 2019 was the year of hype and snake oil when it came to chatbots. 2020 will be a year of pragmatism and real results – Interview with Abinash Tripathy of Helpshift – and is number 329 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Rohit:

Rohit and I have spoken on the podcast before: back in Feb 2017.
Non obvious thinking is seeing the world a little bit differently and coming up with better, different and more unique ideas.
The whole Non-Obvious trend series over the last ten years must have generated over 150 different trends.
Rohit’s definition of a trend is that it’s a curated observation of the accelerating present.
Here’s an insight into five of the Non-Obvious Megatrends:
- Ungendering – Traditional gender divisions and labels are getting replaced with a more fluid understanding of gender identity, forcing a reevaluation of how we see employees, customers, brands and one another.
- Instant Knowledge – As we become accustomed to consuming bite- sized knowledge on demand, we benefit from learning everything more quickly but risk forgetting the value of mastery and wisdom.
- Human Mode – Tired of technology that isolates us from one another, people seek out and place greater value on physical, authentic and “unperfect” experiences designed with empathy and delivered by humans.
- Purposeful Profit – As consumers and employees demand more sustainable and ethical practices from businesses, companies respond by adapting products, taking stands on issues, and putting purpose first.
- Flux Commerce – As the lines between industries erode, how we sell and buy anything changes constantly, leading to a continual disruption of business models, distribution channels, consumer expectations and even innovation itself.
The upside of instant knowledge is that we can learn things and get information much, much faster. The downside is that access to information is not the same as deep understanding or expertise.
In a world where we have more automation and more technology, we will value the human option more and more and consider it to be a luxury worth paying for.
There’s a slow movement now because some of us are becoming frustrated with fast.
What would it take to create a new label that says “Made with empathy”?
The big challenge is how do we build or how do organizations build their empathy?
Rohit’s Punk CX word: irreverence.
Rohit’s brand that epitomises a punk ethos: Oatly as they do the opposite of what you might expect.

About Rohit

Rohit Bhargava is a leading authority on marketing, trends and innovation. He is the Founder of the Non-Obvious Company and previously spent over 15 years advising large organizations on digital and marketing at two respected global agencies: Leo Burnett and Ogilvy. Rohit is widely considered one of the most entertaining and original keynote speakers on marketing disruption and innovation in the world. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of six books on topics as wide ranging as the future of business, building a human brand with personality, and why leaders always eat left handed. He has been invited to deliver sold-out keynotes and workshops to change the way teams and leaders think at the World Bank, NASA, Intel, LinkedIn, MetLife, Under Armour, Univision, Disney and hundreds of other well-known organizations. Rohit also teaches a popular course on marketing and storytelling at Georgetown University in Washington DC and writes a monthly column on trends for GQ magazine in Brazil.