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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Strategic Downgrading

As more products become Internet-enabled and digitalized, consumers are selectively rejecting supposedly improved products and services, opting for simpler, cheaper, and sometimes more functional versions instead.

E-mpulse Buying

While e-commerce is changing the way people impulse buy, the integration of mobile devices into the shopping experience has opened up possibilities for real-time marketing that encourages people to make split-second emotional buying decisions in a new way.

Branded Utility

Brands are using a combination of content marketing and greater integration between marketing and operations to augment promotions with practical and human added value.

Small Data

As consumers generate increasingly large volumes of actionable, real-time data through their online activities and connected devices, brand-owned big data will lose value and utility.

Engineered Addiction

Thanks to our increasing understanding of the behavioral science behind the formation of habits, marketers, designers, and engineers are creating products and services that are as addictive as possible.

Experimedia

Content creators make use of social experiments and real-life interactions to reveal interesting insight about human behavior and build more authentic connections with their audiences.

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.

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.