Dear Fellow Trend Curator,

Right now I’m deep into lots and lots and lots of books as we review all the submissions we received this year for the Non-Obvious Book Awards. The winners for the Longlist and Shortlist will be announced in early December and before then I’ll be offering some teasers about book themes, trends and more … so that’s been keeping me busy along with a few final speaking gigs to close out the year. I hope you’re all getting some time to reflect on the past year too as we head into a holiday week here in America.

In stories this week, you’ll read about Jaguar’s controversial new logo and why it might not be as terrible as people suggest, how U.S. food policy may soon get reinvented, the return of short form video, why most people hate the sound of their own voice and the beautiful schadenfreude of the AI scambaiting Granny.

Enjoy the stories and stay curious!

Rohit

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The Win-Win Strategy of Jaguar’s Controversial New Brand and Logo

British luxury car brand Jaguar just launched a new rebrand and it's sparking some controversy online because of how radically it moves away from the very recognizable pouncing cat logo that has defined the brand for centuries.

Most of the ire seems to speculate that there's a new team and CMO in charge, the brand is suffering from declining sales and therefore they must have taken the most short-sighted approach of throwing out all their brand heritage and forgetting where the brand comes from. Some of these accusations may be true.

But consider the opposite scenario. What if this becomes the ultimate win-win strategy for the brand? On one hand, announcing a drastic brand overhaul is sure to invite people to reconsider the brand and bring true fans out of the shadows. In addition, refocusing on EV growth and attracting a new audience may require exactly this sort of bold change.

Over time, this feels like a win-win solution for the brand. Either the detractors win and they backtrack to the old beloved logo thereby reminding people of why the brand was so popular in the first place. Or the new positioning wins, indicating that it's a brave new era at the brand and that it has successfully made a transition into the future. What do you think? Is this a short sighted branding choice or a smart long term strategy to make the brand relevant again?

A Major Reinvention of Food Policy May Be Coming. Is That Good News?

Activists and consumers who believe food regulations in the U.S. need to be overhauled are getting excited right now. The recent media spotlight has been on President-elect Trump's pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In the past, he has been a vocal vaccine-skeptic and blames the food industry for the “mass poisoning of American children” through food ingredients and additives. His appointment, if confirmed by the Senate, will likely affect everything from the legality of food additives to the use of pesticides on farms.

On a less controversial note, the mobile app Yuka is adding a new feature that allows people to report food and cosmetics products for being unhealthy. The app is a wonderful companion while shopping in a grocery store (I use it all the time) to determine what foods have potentially harmful additives. Their newest feature allows you to now report those additives directly to companies as a way to inspire them to change and the app has been getting results.

This combination of tools to allow easier activism from consumers and a government appointee potentially in a position of power who holds extreme views on this topic could create a domino effect that will dramatically shift food policy in the U.S. over the next several years. Will this deliver healthier food alternatives as promised, or replace a sometimes flawed system with an even more broken one? Hit reply and let me know what you think.

Short Form Video Is Back and It Might Actually Have Been a Great Idea After All

Four years ago with much fanfare (and budget), a platform called Quibi with the promise that people would watch short vertical episodic shows and that would be the future of entertainment. Then, despite their $1.75 billion funding, they crashed and burned. Around the same time, TikTok was just starting to take off. Since then, the growth of vertical video has exploded.

This week there was a feature in Fast Company about the rapid rise of two short form video platforms (DramaBox and ReelShort) that are both enjoying success both financially and attentionally as their paid user base is growing. These apps offer one minute long episodes of short soap opera style stories and you swipe up to keep watching. Content aside, one other reason the article suggests for their success is how they offer multiple free episodes to get you hooked and then ask you to pay for access … unlike Quibi which started off with a monthly subscription model. Another explanation may come from the fact that these new platforms did not rely on splashy high budget content featuring name brand actors. As a result, it’s possible that their content could be seen as more genuine and closer to the vertical videos people are already accustomed to watching.

Whether it’s time, casting, business model — or some combination of all of these factors — the long awaited promise of short form video as a new form of entertainment (and maybe even art) seems to finally have arrived.

Why Do Most People Hate The Sound Of Their Own Voice?

Do you hate to listen back to a recording of your own voice? Most people do and this has been true for so long that the first studies into why so many of us dread hearing ourselves date back to the 1960s. At that time, a team of researchers coined the term "voice confrontation" to describe their theory that most of us dislike our voices because what we expect to hear and what we actually hear on a recording sound more different to us than anyone else.

There may be other reasons too, from feeling envy that your voice doesn't sound more like [fill in the blank] or believing that your voice in an inaccurate portrayal of you. It's hard to feel ashamed or afraid of your voice. So can this be overcome? Researchers suggest one way to do this might be to practice having the voice you want so you can hear yourself differently. Another even simpler solution is to remind yourself that the way you already sound to others might be exactly what you were wishing for ... you were just unable to hear it that way yourself.

The AI Granny Scambaiter Is An Elegant Solution To Waste Robocaller’s Time

The largest mobile operator in the UK clearly has a delicious sense of humor and a life-affirming appreciation for schadenfreude. Especially if that misfortune we are delighting in comes at the expense of people working for scam robocaller networks trying to hustle people out of their money. Daisy, as this “scambaiting Grandma AI” is known, was designed to engage phone scammers in endless, realistic conversations with synthetic grannies. Here’s a short take on how it worked:

“In what can only be described as next-level scambaiting, Daisy’s interactions with scammers involves sharing fabricated personal information and engaging in extended, irrelevant conversations – effectively wasting the fraudsters’ time. According to O2, Daisy has kept scammers on the line for up to 40 minutes.”

Who says AI developers can’t have a bit of fun and put something positive out into the world at the same time?

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

Pretending You Care by Norm Feutl

As we head into a holiday season, the Black Friday deals are already getting published out there and you might be thinking about heading out and engaging in a bit of consumerism yourself to get deals, buy gifts and spend some money on things you probably don’t need. In advance, I’d like to recommend picking up this old-but-still-great book about exactly why it sucks so badly to be working in retail right now dealing with all of us and our unrealistic expectations. Through pages filled with observational humor about everything from the “flawyer” (a customer who uses their uneducated misinterpretation of the law to make a point … ie - accusing you of “false advertising”) to recommendations on feigning product knowledge (like the time when a customer asked him what kind of “gription” a pair of boots had … to which he immediately responded that they had a “gription rating of eight.”)

Whether you have ever worked in retail or just plan to experience retail as a customer, this brutally honest inside look at what the life of a retail store employee is really like might just get you to think twice about your own behavior when you walk into a store. It might help make all of us just a little bit kinder this retail season too.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

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:

• Study Shows Lucid Dreaming Apps Can Triple User’s Awareness In Dreams

• New York Introduces Fourth Traffic Light Color To Make Way For Commuters

• McDonald’s Is Bringing Back It’s Most Randomly Available Menu Item: the Bafflingly Popular McRib

• William Shatner’s Captain Kirk Returns One Last Time in an Eight-minute Short Film

• Construction Boards Made From Old Clothes Offer An Inventive New Way To Reuse Discarded Textiles

How are these stories curated?