Faith Popcorn
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Faith Popcorn (born February 11, 1947) is a futurist and founder of the boutique consultancy, BrainReserve. Fortune (magazine) called her the "Nostradamus of marketing."[1] By 1991 she was a leading trend expert who published her first book, The Popcorn Report. The book concerned what to expect from American culture and business in the decade ahead, The Popcorn Report documented the projections she and her consultancy had been delivering the world's most powerful companies since 1974. She claims they had 95% accuracy, but this claim is disputed.
Prior to forming BrainReserve, Faith Popcorn was an award-winning advertising agency creative director. She is a graduate of New York University and New York’s High School of Performing Arts. She has an eight-year-old daughter adopted from China named G.G., and divides her time between New York and East Hampton.
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[edit] Ideas and theories of Faith Popcorn
"Brailing the culture" is Faith Popcorn's term for analyzing a broad range of macro and micro cultural developments. By "brailling the culture", she argues one can identify the threads which both bind the culture together and determine its development. She call these threads "trends."
Ms. Popcorn identified seventeen trends that she argued determine consumer behavior. They represent psychological drivers, basic needs and enduring desires. These, in conjunction with wider social, cultural, political, economic and market trends, have the power not only to describe consumer behavior, but also to predict how that behavior will change over time.
The seventeen trends she mentioned are called: 99 Lives, Anchoring, AtmosFEAR, Being Alive, Cashing Out, Clanning, Cocooning, Down-Aging, EGOnomics, EVEolution, Fantasy Adventure, FutureTENSE, Icon Toppling, Pleasure Revenge, S.O.S. (Save Our Society), Small Indulgences, Vigilante Consumer.
Ms. Popcorn also developed an "InCulture Marketing" model that concerned the difficulty of reaching and holding consumers' attention and delivering clients a significant return on their investments. The idea of "InCulture Marketing" turns the culture itself into a medium for brand communications. It attempts to place the "DNA" of specific brands into the DNA of specific sub-cultures. Faith Popcorn was awarded a gold Effie award in 2006 for her recent successes with InCulture Marketing.
[edit] Criticism
A common criticism is that many of her statements are open to interpretation and therefore the 1990s, or individual years in the 2000s, can appear to fulfill her predictions regardless of what actually happened.[2] William A. Sherden in The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions ISBN 0471358444 takes a skeptical view of her ideas about Cocooning, among other things, and concludes she was simply wrong on several key issues.[3]
[edit] Bibliography
- The Popcorn Report,
- Clicking (co-authored with Lys Marigold),
- EVEolution: The Eight Truths of Marketing to Women (co-authored with Lys Marigold),
- Dictionary of the Future (co-authored with Adam Hanft)
