Faith Popcorn
Faith Popcorn (born as Faith Plotkin)[1] is a futurist, author, and founder and CEO of marketing consulting firm BrainReserve. Her best-selling book is The Popcorn Report (1991).
Phrases
Popcorn has coined various terms and phrases in her publications. For example "Brailling the culture" is her term for analyzing a range of cultural developments. Popcorn has identified a number of trends that she argued determine consumer behavior. She also developed a marketing model she calls "InCulture Marketing", which she says turns the culture itself into a medium for brand communications.
Predictions
A 2008 Los Angeles Times entertainment section article, following Popcorn's predictions over a period of five years, credited her with identifying trends such as "food coaches" and "transcouture".[2] In The Popcorn Report, she predicts that we will "Own your Own Android: You won't see humans driving buses, at supermarket check outs, or serving up fast (slow) food. They'll be replaced by colonies of androids who can walk your dog or fight your war."Faith Popcorn
She is also quoted offering a prediction that "mechanized hugging booths" will replace pay phones in cities as part of a cultural trend toward more physical contact. She's also said that 1950s slang will make a big comeback and that advances in genetics will allow people to custom design pets with bits of their own DNA so their dogs and cats resemble them. Other examples from this series of 2006 predictions of marketing trends that Popcorn claimed "were just around the corner" include lingerie infused with "neuro-chemicals" to enhance confidence, and demand for "retort coaches" to help people sharpen their wit. Popcorn also predicted "removable cochlear-implants, rentable by the hour, that instantly lend you fluency in French or an understanding of how to tune a car".[3]
Business book author William A. Sherden takes a skeptical view of her ideas about cocooning, her most famous prediction, and concludes she was wrong on several other sampled predictions. On cocooning he provides statistics that demonstrate double digit percentage growth in activities outside the home in the five years following her prediction.[4]
Listed as an example of government wastes of taxpayer dollars, the U.S. Postal Service paid $566,000 to Faith Popcorn to envision a viable future for the post office. [5]
Bibliography
- The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life. New York: Doubleday, 1991. ISBN 978-0-385-40000-8
- with Lys Marigold. Clicking: 16 Trends to Future Fit Your Life, Your Work, and Your Business. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ISBN 978-0-88730-694-5
- EVEolution: The Eight Truths of Marketing to Women (co-authored with Lys Marigold),
- with Adam Hanft. The Dictionary of the Future: The Words, Terms and Trends That Define the Way We'll Live, Work and Talk, New York: Hyperion, 2001. ISBN 978-0-7868-7007-3
References
- ↑ Keyes, Ralph. The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, Macmillan 2004, p. 87
- ↑ "Faith Popcorn's Predictions Five Years Later". Los Angeles Times. 2008. Retrieved 2010-05-02.
- ↑ "Faith Popcorn's predictions - 9 products of the future". 2006.
- ↑ Sherden, William A. (1999). The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions. New York: John Wiley & Sons. p. 223. ISBN 0-471-35844-4.
- ↑ "Gov’t wasted $30 billion on ‘pillownauts,’ crystal goblets — buying human urine!". 2013.
External links
|