Icons Will Fall As ‘Egonomics’ Takes Over Trend-Spotter Says Businesses Need To Ask If Customers Are Happy

So here’s what you do.

You meet someone in an airport - or while waiting for the train, or while standing in line at the supermarket - you chat them up, then unload the big question.

“Are you happy?”

“Don’t ask this question of anyone you live with,” said trend-spotter and tradeshow headliner Faith Popcorn. “They aren’t happy. And it’s your fault.”

But ask the “happy” question often enough, and listen carefully enough, she advised a ballroom full of businesspeople invited by the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, and you too can be a trend-spotter, if not a best-selling author as she is.

Of course, said Popcorn, author of “Clicking” and “The Popcorn Report,” the question doesn’t have to be so global. Bankers, for example, ought to spend more time randomly asking people, one at a time: “Are you happy with your bank?”

Then, by trying to figure out how to make that individual happy and by visualizing a business through a customer’s eyes, the banker or the grocer or the insurance salesman might be able to tap into a new business opportunity, pick up on a trend, or solve a nagging problem.

Or, if she gets really lucky, the executive can coin some nifty phrases, bang out some books explaining her big ideas, tap into the consulting circuit and take her insights and wit on the road the way Popcorn does, talking to the suited masses of people in dark ballrooms over the clinking of water glasses.

Does that sound a little bit cheeky?

It’s nothing more than icon-toppling, another Popcorn trend.

Right and left, Popcorn, the icon of what’s-happening-next, the woman who makes her living by talking about the future for up to $30,000 a pop at 40 or 45 similar gatherings a year, breezed through about a dozen of what she sees as the major trends for the coming years.

One is icon-toppling. We no longer have trust in any major person or institution, Popcorn said. And so, for example, Americans are turning to homeopathic medicine, rejecting, or at least distrusting, the medical establishment. Anything alternative, therefore, will become more attractive to consumers, she said.

Thin, energetic and attended by her lookalike younger sister, Faith Popcorn, who changed her name from Faith Plotkin, sports a swatch of fuchsia in her close-cropped hair.

Weekdays, she and her staff at the BrainReserve, company headquarters in a Manhattan brownstone, read a multitude of magazines and conduct 4,000 interviews a year in an effort to smell the trends before they see them.

And what have they learned?

“Egonomics,” said Popcorn. As institutions grow and become more remote, more depersonalized and less trusted, successful businesses will be those that can customize. People want to be recognized as individuals.

Anchoring, or the search for spiritual and religious grounding, means that religion sections in bookstores are seeing increased growth, and so are sales of angels and votive candles.

Cocooning, the desire of people to retreat to their homes, continues, Popcorn said. Evidence of that, she said, is found in the growth in high-tech home-entertainment systems and the incredible success of homemaking queen Martha Stewart.