Welcome to The
Non-Obvious^TM
Trend Collection

Every year our team curates the most interesting and impactful trends shaping culture and business. On this site, you can browse all of the trends from the past nine years by category, industry or year.

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Reluctant Marketing

Marketing used to focus almost exclusively on the messaging behind and promotion of products and services, but today, marketers are becoming key to informing their organizations’ product development and research.

Everyday Stardom

Some of today’s most innovative and influential ideas are coming from complete outsiders whose unconventional quirks disrupt entire industries.

Overquantified Life

Big data is offering more ways to quantify the world around us, but brands must be careful not to accumulate more data than they know what to do with.

Microdesign

The increasingly visual way that we experience and consume the world around us is creating a demand for information presented through efficient design and imagery.

Shareable Humanity

Content shared on social media is becoming more emotional as brands inject more humanity into powerful content marketing and branded storytelling efforts.

Anti-Stereotyping

Across media and entertainment, traditional gender roles are being reversed as assumptions about alternative lifestyles and the ways we define ourselves evolve.

Distributed Expertise

As online platforms change how we learn and gain access to previously unreachable experts, the idea of expertise itself is shifting to become more inclusive, less academic and more accessible in real time.

Curated Sensationalism

Today, many of the most popular online “news” destinations are replacing traditional journalism with smart curation, gathering content from across the web and using persuasively written sensational headlines to drive millions of views.

Instant Entrepreneurs

Better support, incentives, and tools for entrepreneurs make it possible for anyone with an idea to launch a startup knowing that the costs and risks of failure are not as high as they once were.