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.

Branded Benevolence

Companies are putting a purpose greater than revenue at the center of their businesses in order to form deeper connections with consumers.

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.

Mood Matching

As tracking technology becomes more sophisticated, marketers are turning to immersive experiences inspired by industries like gaming to make sure that their content adapts to their consumers’ moods.

Glanceable Content

Marketing effectively today means capturing the attention of a consumer base that is increasingly resistant to the stream of content they see all day.