User:Chagedorn1/Faith Popcorn

Faith Popcorn, (born May 11, 1943 as Faith Plotkin), is a futurist, author, and founder and CEO of the marketing consultancy BrainReserve. Prior to founding her company, Popcorn was an advertising agency creative director. She is a graduate of New York University and New York City's High School for the Performing Arts. Popcorn discussed her personal history and the origin of her name with The New York Times on July 17, 2005:

“My name was Faith Beryl Plotkin. After I graduated from New York University I was a copy chief for a small ad agency, Salit & Garlanda, where the art director, Gene Garlanda, didn't find my name aesthetically pleasing. He'd introduce me, saying, This is Faith Popcorn. I started using the name immediately and changed it legally about a year after that. It felt much more like me.”

Faith Popcorn’s best selling books (see Bibliography) include The Popcorn Report, Clicking and EVEolution. Among the print publications that have interviewed Popcorn, featured her, or quoted her are the New York Times, Time, and Fortune. She has also appeared on NBC’s “The Today Show,” CBS’s “Face the Nation,” and ABC’s “Good Morning America,” as well as on CNN.

Popcorn has also long been in demand as a public speaker, delivering to audiences worldwide her insights on how trends in the culture will affect consumer lifestyles and purchasing behavior. Her lectures are now finding their way to the web -- you can view her recent speech to LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) on YouTube. [1] Follow her on Twitter @FaithPopcorn or @PopcornBrains.

Faith Popcorn spent her early years in Shanghai, China. Later, she moved with her parents to New York’s East Village. She now divides her time between Manhattan, where FPBR corporate offices are located, and Wainscott, New York. She has two daughters ages 6 and 12, adopted in China.

Phrases and terms coined by Faith Popcorn

Popcorn has coined various terms and phrases in her publications over the past 36 years. For example "Brailling the Culture" is her company’s term for identifying, collecting and analyzing global cultural developments. Cocooning, the “stay at home” Trend, has made it in to Webster’s Dictionary.

In her books “The Popcorn Report” and “Clicking,” Popcorn identified 17 long term trends based upon her company’s global observation and analysis of consumer behavior. Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve has also developed a marketing model called "InCulture Marketing" – grounded in Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message” – where culture itself becomes a medium for brand communications. Popcorn argues that brand behavior in the larger culture rather than advertising messaging is a key determinant of long-term brand success. Other Popcorn trends like “Being Alive” – Awareness that good health extends longevity and leads to a new way of life; and “SOS (Save our Society) – The country rediscovers a social conscience of ethics, passion and compassion – support this observation that consumers’ relationships with brands are complex, personal and emotional. [2]

Praise & Criticism

Popcorn cites that her predictions have had a 95% accuracy rate, based upon an assessment of a Los Angeles Times recap of her work in 2008 (see references) . Other publications have also assessed her predictions and compared them to unfolding events, including The San Francisco Examiner and The New Yorker. Fortune Magazine has called her the “Nostradamus of marketing.”

Her company’s “OUCH!” campaign for Tylenol won a 2006 American Marketing Association “Effie” Award. [3] The “OUCH!” campaign consisted of inCulture efforts to raise awareness of Tylenol among young people, including the unbranded construction of Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s first free skate park. Clients of Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve also include Avon, Campbell's, Colgate, Gillette, Johnson & Johnson, KFC, Nabisco, Nike, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, McNeil (Tylenol), Tyson, and Visa.

Popcorn’s cultural contributions include adding to the lexicon -- transforming the word “cocoon” from a science-class noun into a verb that captures the home-as-shelter impulse. The Cocooning trend (retreating into safe, homelike environments as a means of protection from the scary outside world) is a primary driver for our current burgeoning markets in home delivery, e-commerce, and home-based businesses.

Popcorn does have some detractors. In 1999 an unpublished paper by students at St. Norbert College examined her forecasts from 1990s The Popcorn Report and concluded: "Faith Popcorn forecasted 10 trends in the 90's on The Popcorn Report, but according to this research, implications of five trends of ten have significant problems. In the real business world, a 50 percent error rate is unacceptable"

Another critic who in some circles might be considered Ms. Popcorn's competitor -- an author, management consultant and adjunct professor at Brandeis University -- William A. Sherden [4] takes a skeptical view of her ideas about cocooning, among other things, and concludes she was simply wrong on several key issues.

“If Popcorn is any kind of genius, it is only for marketing and self promotion, for she has packaged pure fantasy and sold it to some of the highest-level executives in U.S. industry.”

In 2007, Popcorn was named one of New York's worst bosses by the gossip blog Gawker-- along with Gawker's own boss Nick Denton, "The Social Network" producer Scott Rudin, media mogul Barry Diller and others. Gawker quoted an anonymous tipster who called her a "micromanager" who would often try to "rip employee's heads off". Other "anonymous tipsters" on Gawker replied:

For all of the people who accuse her of 'ripping off heads' you wouldn't last 60 seconds in a Wall Street environment. It takes vision, tenacity and yes, a lot of fire, especially for a woman who started her business in the 70's, to succeed over three decades."

AND

"A lot of people do have trouble seeing a woman who embodies many of the traits that were formerly ascribed to men (eccentricity, particularity, agression in business) and it is sad that she has fallen victim to that kind of attack"

Philip Morris interest in promotiong Popcorn's "Pleasure Revenge" trend in 1993-94

Three years after the publication of The Popcorn Report outlining Popcorn’s trend “Pleasure Revenge” – “consumers are having a secret bacchanal. They’re mad as hell and want to cut loose again” – a 1993 internal Philip Morris (PM) memorandum from Karen Daragan, then Manager of Philip Morris' Media programs, to colleague Ellen Merlo discusses PM's desire to team up with Faith Popcorn, noting her comments in the media at the time that the public was "fed up with self-deprivation in the name of health." According to the memo, Daragan's goal was to "broaden the reach of 'pleasure revenge' news and publicize the new trend of indulgence and anti-politically correct behavior that Faith Popcorn has noticed and recently discussed in the press."

Daragan wrote that she hoped to create video news releases (VNRs are pre-recorded "news stories" that corporations make and shop around to television networks) about the public trend of "pleasure revenge" upon which Popcorn had previous written to amplify coverage of Popcorn's claims that people were "fed up with self-deprivation in the name of health." Daragan proposed a soundbite to be used in the VNR:

"Potential soundbite: People are fed up with self-deprivation in the name of health and politically correct behavior; we're sick of being perfect. In a decade marked predominantly by fear and cutting back...we want to cut loose again. That's why more people are smoking and drinking socially and just plain enjoying themselves. "

Although there is no evidence of Popcorn’s direct participation other than as author of the term “Pleasure Revenge” three years earlier, a video news release, was, in fact, created, at a cost of $18,000.

Article and Internal PM internal memo supporting media interest in the "Pleasure Revenge" trend in the 1990s

• Debra Goldman, AdWeek The Pleasure Principle Magazine article. January 12, 1994. Bates No. 2070132092 - AdWeek magazine article about smoking and "pleasure revenge" Neither Faith Popcorn or her company is mentioned or quoted in this article
• Philip Morris Sound Science and Pleasure Revenge News Clips Memorandum. November 19, 1996. Bates No. 2072197032 Neither Faith Popcorn or her company is mentioned or quoted in this brief internal PM memo congratulating the PM team on successful media pitches for 'Restaurant Revenge'

Predictions

Every year, Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve releases a set of far-reaching predictions based on their examination of changes in the culture over the previous year. These predictions are posted at the company website. [5]

A recent 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." Other Popcorn predictions include casual Fridays and widespread shopping on the Internet.

Less famously, Popcorn has also predicted “Touchy Feely Services,” saying “our material opulence has bred isolation and left us emotionally starving -- we crave physical contact” which might even mean that “mechanized hugging booths will replace pay-phones in cities” as part of a cultural trend toward casual – but not sexual – intimacy.

Also in 2006, Popcorn identified a trend in “Secondhand Nostalgia” identifying the ongoing popularity of “retro” among the younger generations and imagining one effect being “that 1950s slang will make a big comeback.” Other predictions anticipated that in the future advances in genetics will allow people to custom design pets with bits of their own DNA, so their dogs and cats resemble them, based upon the observation that “today, we treat our pets like surrogate children” – a trend even more prevalent in Japan.

Other cultural currents from this series of 2006 predictions include “Mood-tuning Products” – currently evidenced in the culture by products like AXE body sprays, but imagined by Popcorn as eventually including “lingerie infused with "neuro-chemicals" to enhance confidence.” Popcorn also outlined a growing trend for “Brain Fitness” including "retort coaches to sharpen your wit’ and “EXPERTease” – where technology drives our desire for increasing knowledge – envisioning "removable cochlear-implants, rentable by the hour, that instantly lend you fluency in French or an understanding of how to tune a car". [12]

Bibliography

Popcorn is the author of several books including: The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life (Doubleday, 1991) The book has been published in 16 countries, including China and Japan, and is now available in 14 languages. It is widely used as a textbook in business-school marketing classes. Her second and third books, co-authored with Lys Marigold, are Clicking: 16 Trends to Future Fit Your Life, Your Work, and Your Business (HarperCollins, 1996) and EVEolution: The Eight Truths of Marketing to Women (Hyperion, 2000). Clicking opened at #3 on the BusinessWeek best-seller list and is currently available in 10 languages. EVEolution appeared on both the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek best-seller lists. Her most recently published book is The Dictionary of the Future: The Words, Terms and Trends That Define the Way We’ll Live, Work, and Talk (Hyperion, 2001), co-authored with Adam Hanft.

External links

• Faith Popcorn official website