In an exclusive interview with The American Bazaar, best-selling author and marketing expert Rohit Bhargava shares his insights on what makes most businesses fail, delivering engaging keynote speeches, the importance of strategy over tactics, and how to make a startup thrive.
Rohit Bhargava is widely known for his engaging and entertaining keynote speeches. He has conducted marketing and innovation workshops for renowned organizations such as the World Bank, NASA, American Express, Microsoft, Intel, LinkedIn, Disney, MetLife, and Univision, among others, across 32 countries. Bhargava is the founder of the Non-Obvious Company and Ideapress Publishing, and he is also a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of 10 books.
Credited with introducing several groundbreaking concepts to the marketing world — such as coining the term social media optimization (SMO) — Bhargava believes that while every successful business may start with a great idea, the key to success lies in how that idea is presented.
Today, Bhargava’s Non-Obvious Company helps brands and leaders discover hidden opportunities and think in innovative, non-obvious ways. His other venture, Ideapress Publishing, specializes in publishing business books.
Bhargava holds a BBA in International Marketing and a BA in English Literature from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, as well as a master’s degree in Professional Writing from George Mason University.
In 1999, during the height of the dot-com boom, Bhargava moved to Australia and began a successful 15-year career as a brand and marketing strategist in the advertising industry.
He worked at two of the world’s largest agencies — first at Leo Burnett in Sydney and later at Ogilvy in Washington, DC — during a pivotal time in marketing history. As digital tools were emerging and behavioral science was advancing, companies began to change the way they understood and applied the principles of persuasion across industries.
In an exclusive interview with The American Bazaar, Bhargava, who currently lives in Washington, discusses marketing innovations, emerging business trends, and the importance of non-obvious thinking for creating successful startups.
American Bazaar: How do you conduct “non-boring” keynote addresses on a topic like business which can be boring or can come across as daunting to many?
Rohit Bhargava: The first thing I have to do as a presenter, whether the room has a thousand people or 20 people, is to connect with them. The non-boring thing is in my bio because what I am trying to set up is an expectation that I am not going to tell the listeners data points or technicalities. Instead, I am going to tell them stories that will cause them to remember the lessons I tell them. And that is my challenge. But the skills I use as a public speaker is a skill set that is useful for all of us – an ability to connect with people. The tragedy is that, a lot of times, we go through all this education but we never take a class that teaches such a necessary life skill. I try to relay that skill through my addresses.
You have spent over a decade leading marketing strategy and advising global brands. What is the biggest advice you would give somebody hoping to start their entrepreneurship journey or set a start up?
One of the main principles of marketing is positioning. How you position yourself is what makes you different or commands how you are differentiated from everyone doing something similar. And that is a very good question one needs to have an answer for. The other thing is making sure that you are creating something that people care about. If you are being different on something no one cares about, you are going to have limited success.
Your venture, IdeaPress, is a hybrid publishing house that brings about dozens of business books. What exactly are you looking for in a business book?
We usually look for three things. If it is an interesting, original idea? Is the person presenting the right fit for it? Let’s say, I could have the most unique idea about a book on pregnancy but are the readers going to buy it from me? So, you have to have a topic that is ownable for you. And the third thing is that it has to feel timely. It can’t be like we should have written this book three years ago.
You have also been teaching marketing, media and communications. What do you think is the most important classroom education on business that you can give your students?
The thing I try to teach my students is the importance of strategy versus tactic. It is important because there are a lot of things you can do to market your idea — you can buy advertisements, you can pay someone to create articles, you can post videos but what you need to know is that, is it actually strategic? Is it actually driving your goals?
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A simple example is — let’s say you are launching a product and you spend a lot of money, you create an Instagram account, get a lot of followers, post cool content. Now people start paying attention to it and they click on the link. But the link sends them to a really bad website that doesn’t do a good job of presenting your product. So, now you don’t sell. People look at that and say all my marketing is not working. But the truth is — it is working; it got people on to your page. What’s not working is your web page. So, that’s an example of strategy – you did all this stuff but your conversion rate is zero. You find that a hundred people went to your website but zero people bought. So now you work towards getting two hundred people to your page but that’s not smart. Instead, what you need to focus on is to see how many out of those hundred you can get to convert into business. The idea is that we tend to focus on micro things instead of macro things.
AB: Do you think business books can be a very niche segment as unlike a fiction or a celebrity autobiography it may not evoke a strong emotion? Is it then a profitable business?
On some level, every book is a niche category. But business books are strong in the sense that people tend to consume business books in a moment of need. So, it could be like — “I am changing jobs” or “I want to find out how to get back into the workforce after having a kid,” or “I am trying to make my startup successful.” So, a lot of times people are looking for actionable information from business books. So, while people may not read business books all the time but when they do, they could be very crucial moments in their life.
Why do you think so many businesses fail?
There are multiple reasons. But the most frequent thing I see is that often people start a business because they have a skillset or are really good at that particular thing. However, they may not be good at selling that thing. As a professional, you have to realize that the expertise to sell your product is a different skill. So, the idea is to recognize those gaps and get people with those specific skills to get that work done for you. And it can be a very mutually beneficial relationship.
You say in your bio that you actively hate cauliflower – what’s with the Gobi?
Gobi is simply disgusting, it’s pretty easy to explain. And it’s not because I am a picky eater or anything. I eat almost everything, recently I ate spiders in Cambodia. There is nothing redeeming about the cauliflower.
But on another note, it is also a marketing thing. The thing is that when I put it in my bio, there is this personal detail about me that usually only people that are close to you would know. This is not something you know about strangers. And now, because people know this about me, all of a sudden there is a detail we could bond over. There have been times that I have gotten off-stage after an intense business summit and at dinner, people have said, “Don’t give it to Rohit, he won’t like it.” So, it kind of becomes a metaphor for letting people know me on a personal level much more quickly.