Kernel Knowledge Meet Faith Popcorn, A Marketing Consultant Who Has A Knack For Spotting Trends
“Knowledge chips” planted in our brains will enable us to speak French instantly, repair the TV, learn golf or whatever.
Do-it-yourself plastic surgery will be accomplished via hand-held devices that erase fine lines and wrinkles.
Genetically engineered cats and dogs will live as long as their human owners - “more wet kisses, fewer tears,” she says.
Trend guru Faith Popcorn speaking, boldly visualizing what no seer has seen before.
Popcorn is the New York marketing consultant who coined the term “cocooning” and dozens of other trend terms, all of which salt her talk. She was in Dallas recently to speak at a Hobby Industry Association show at the Dallas Convention Center and to promote a revised edition of “Clicking,” a trend book aimed at small entrepreneurs.
Among kernels of advice Popcorn dropped in rapid-fire delivery:
“Cigars are going to be around for a while, because they are hedonistic, which is Pleasure Revenge (a trend term). That’s a phase we’re going through, as shown by our renewed interest in such items as brandy, wines, steak, fur coats.”
Cigarettes aren’t going away either. “I think that the more you tell young people not to smoke, the more attracted they’re going to be.” However, we will have new kinds of cigarettes that don’t present the same health dangers.
Beanie Babies are popular because “They’re Cocooning, Fantasy Adventure, Down-Aging (nostalgia) and Icon-Toppling, because they are not Barbie and not a brand name. They are also Anchoring, because of their spirituality.”
They won’t last “but somebody’s making a lot of money. …I just wouldn’t want to be the last person buying one at an inflated price.”
“Martha Stewart is the queen of cocooning,” Popcorn says, likening her TV show to “homemaking voyeurism: You know how to do it, but you want to watch somebody else.”
An important new retail market is “MOBYs (mother older, baby younger) and DOBYs (daddy older, baby younger) who are raising little Trophy Kids.”
“Bookstores are the singles bars of the ‘90s. … How bad can you look when you’re holding a book?” She says they’ve become popular because they offer all the amenities of a dinner party, including food, drink and interesting people.
“Cellular phones are bad.” Later, she says she’s not really against them, but she turns hers off much of the time, especially in places such as movies. “It’s not polite to let your technology get in someone else’s way.”
Voicemail and e-mail are overused, too.
“I sometimes get 120 voicemails in a day. I can’t be that important. … I think people are just wanting a little contact.”
Retail stores are expiring “like a dragon thrashing its tail.” Soon, she says, most of us will be doing all our shopping in electronic “virtual reality” stores.
On service stations: “You don’t see any (infant) changing tables in the restrooms. They’re not female friendly. I still feel a bit scared as a woman.”
On the bag lunches some airlines are setting out for passengers to pick up as they board flights: “It’s abuse! We’re being abused by these airlines. I want service. I want my food brought to me. I want to know who’s flying the plane, and I want help lifting my luggage.”
On doing your own market survey: “There are two ways to figure out what people are buying: Look in supermarket carts or look in their garbage. Looking in supermarket carts is the most pleasant.”
“Start watching TV. … It’s your culture talking back to you.” On such popular shows as “Seinfeld,” “Ally McBeal” and “Murphy Brown,” “there are no traditional families,” Popcorn notes, “and 76 percent of the people in the country are not in traditional families.”
“Get on the computer.” She says a study has shown that exposure to electronic games and other technology has caused changes in our brains so that we think faster.
“Smarter? I don’t think so,” she says. “Our brains are busier but not necessarily smarter.”
“Atmos-Fear” is Popcorn’s newest trend name, and there’s a chapter on it in the revised “Clicking,” which she co-authored with Lys Marigold. (Popcorn’s real name is Plotkin; Marigold’s was formerly Margold.)
Atmos-Fear is environmentalism taken to the nth degree. Popcorn says we have all become terrified by mad cow disease, E. coli outbreaks and other food-borne illnesses, the re-emergence of tuberculosis, toxins in the air, water and so on.
Among other things, this will lead to “source-protected” foods with the entire growing and manufacturing chain documented for purity, she says. But to be safe, we’ll all own “one of the newly reliable portable food testers.”