The Sales Secrets of Art Traders, How Obesity Drugs Are Transforming Travel and the Upside of Cutting Down Trees

What if cutting down more trees, at the right time, was the best thing you could do to save the Earth? Which themes across hundreds of books offer trend insights that will matter in 2024? How can a day in the life of an art seller explain the truth about selling anything?

Why are obesity drugs likely to change everything about the future of travel? What is the real marketing lesson behind Marvel Studio’s first film flop in 15 years? All these stories and a link to the newly announced Shortlist and winners from our annual book awards are all in this week’s edition of the Non-Obvious Newsletter. 

Enjoy the stories this week and stay non-obvious,

The Minus Chair Saves the Earth by Cutting Down More Trees?

What if you could design furniture that captures more carbon than it emits? That’s the vision behind the Minus Chair, a design award winning new product from Norwegian brand Minus that is rethinking furniture design and selling. Trees only absorb carbon as they grow to maturity. After that, as they deteriorate, they release that carbon back into the atmosphere. So, as Minus has discovered, if you could cut down a tree at the right moment you will trap all that carbon inside the wood for the rest of its life.

Beyond rethinking how materials are sourced, Minus is also reinventing their sales model by selling its chairs with a subscription rental service model. Their strategy is to design with “a 100-year perspective.” When a chair reaches its end of useful life, they will take the pieces back and turn the wood into a sort of fertilizer that will continue to retain its carbon.

This circular design model is one that Henry and I wrote about in our “Beyond Net Zero” trend from The Future Normal that we believe will gain even more traction in 2024 as more carbon-negative products will offer a net positive impact on the environment with each unit sold.

Behind the Parties, Pills, and Paintings at the Art Basel Fair in Miami Beach

Sold artwork at an art fair receives a revered red dot sticker indicating it has found a home, or it has been “placed” (in art lingo). But what does it take to make that sale and who are these collectors who travel to the world’s biggest art festivals, checkbook in hand ready to become a supporting patron for today’s artists?

I found this insider look at the real day to day life of an art trader at the Art Basel show happening this coming weekend in Miami Beach to be quite eye-opening. Celebrity parties with people doing cocaine in the background. The quiet (and not so quiet) desperation of art galleries who are often one bad show away from shutting their doors. And most interestingly, the emotive and vulnerable necessity of letting yourself get lost in a work of art before you can really authentically have success in selling it.

I am still not sure whether being a successful art trader requires a healthy embrace of imagined culture or is a heroic service that keeps art alive in our modern world. Maybe it’s both. Reading this candid exposé, you may be left with a similar question.

6 Non-Obvious Trends from Books That Shaped 2023

A-Curated-Shortlist-of-the-Best-Non-Fiction-Books-of-2023

After six months of reading and deliberation, this week I shared our big Shortlist announcement for the top 15 books of the year, as well as a look at six curated macro trends from the hundreds of books published in 2023: Human AI, Good Work, Beyond Happiness, Forgotten Foundations, Broken Healthcare and Fix the Future. You can watch the full show with reviews for all our picks and a description of the trends in the video linked below which is making the rounds right now (we just passed 30,000 views in the first 48 hours!) …

How Obesity Drugs Are Creating a “Seismic” Shift in the Travel Industry

As more people are taking GLP-1 drugs to lose dramatic amounts of weight, the implications for travel are definitely more than what you’re imagining … or what the industry is ready for.

Yes, restaurants will be impacted as people eat and order less food. But TSA may run into challenges as people no longer look like their ID photos taken many pounds ago. Airlines could save a stunning $80M per year in fuel costs if the average passenger drops just ten pounds. Active travel experiences will see new audiences from healthier people who are able to move more freely.

Most importantly, when people feel better, they want to travel more. All of this means the next few years for travel may look very different from the past several decades when obesity has consistently been on the rise and open new frontiers for the brands that are ready for this new traveler mindset and body type.

As travel site Skift concludes, “the Ozempic Era could be good for airlines, all-inclusive resorts, cruises, experience providers and tour operators. It might be bad for theme parks, hotels, movie theaters, and entertainment venues that rely on food, drinks and concessions.”

The Marketing Lesson Behind Marvel Studios First Box Office Failure in 15 Years

On the heels of a disappointing first several weeks of box office ticket sales for the new Marvel movie, Disney studio leadership immediately laid the blame on director Nia DaCosta. Then they apparently gave up on salvaging sales almost immediately, refused to consider early streaming, stopped reporting box office numbers and even started rethinking what was once celebrated as a brilliant crossover strategy between TV and film worlds. Finally, they launched desperate last minute marketing shifts that released spoilers, undermined the story and likely hurt the film’s box office performance even more.

None of it accounts for probably the biggest reason for the film’s underperformance: the fact that the theatrical release was squarely during the actor’s strike, which meant that A-list cast members like Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson were unable to do the usual media interviews and draw attention to the film to remind moviegoers to hit the theaters. 

Ultimately, the entire story offers a case study in how large brand leadership team can fail to understand the real reason for early setbacks and make a situation far worse through overreaction. The bottom-line marketing lesson: panic combined with impatience can kill an otherwise viable product.

The Disinformation Reality of Facebook Isn’t Unsolvable, Solutions Just Keep Getting Defunded.

A disinformation researcher named Joan Donovan  who was investigating Facebook was recently forced out of Harvard University in suspiciously similar timing to a $500 million donation being made to the university by former alums Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. This tracks with a history of underinvesting in groups that moderate content on the platform or investigate how Facebook has made it easier for manipulators and liars to have their damaging ideas spread. Making matters worse, the third party groups the site once employed to do this have gone out of business due to traumatized employees and miserable working conditions. Though it may seem like it, this is not an unsolvable problem.

Yes, better automated content moderation tools could help and AI may be a valuable ally in helping to filter the worst offending content. In order for either to work, Facebook would need to significantly reinvest a much higher portion of its annual profits to hire, support, train and bolster human content moderators to make their platforms better and help train AI to do the same.

Here’s how that could happen. Funds donated to non-profits are regularly done so with stipulations on how they must be used. What if advertisers or investors did the same thing? Facebook/Meta would then be forced to spend orders of magnitude more money on content moderation and algorithmic initiatives to actually make their platform more truthful, human and empathetic.

This isn’t an unfixable problem, it’s just one that needs a lot more spending. We (and our world governments) just need to make it a priority to find more ways to force Facebook to put their money where their indifference currently sits. 

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I’m able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2023 speaking reel on YouTube >>

This Non-Obvious Insights Newsletter is curated by Rohit Bhargava.

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