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Faith Popcorn (born Plotkin) has been an advisor to the biggest U.S. companies--including Phillip Morris, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Campbell Soup Co.--since 1974, when she formed BrainReserve, a trend-watcher for corporate America. BrainReserve employees conduct more than 3,000 consumer interviews a year, Popcorn will tell you, creating electronic tea leaves which Popcorn reads to anticipate buying behavior up to 10 years in the future. In addition, the futurist tirelessly "brailles" the culture--her term--for clues into changing consumer psychology.
"We watch all the best-selling everything"--tapes, books, movies, shows--then draw connections with other mass market events to anticipate key marketplace trends, says Popcorn.
In her recently published The Popcorn Report: The Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life (Doubleday, 1991), Popcorn cites 11 trends she expects will characterize the lives of American consumers in the coming decade. Popcorn urges manufacturers and service providers to pay attention to these 11 patterns and respond accordingly--go "on trend," she urges them--or face obsolescence.
But the woman who helped coin the pop-sociology buzzwords that dominate mainstream discussions of American culture--remember "cocooning," the mass turn inward, toward home and family?--is an iconoclast when it comes to international business. Never mind that pop culture is America's most far-ranging export, that our TV shows, films, and rock videos reach every corner of the globe. Popcorn says the Global Village is still years away, and voices skepticism that American companies are ready for world trade. In her view, we "screw up globally" by exporting American presumptions rather than creating products that meet actual consumer needs overseas. Lacking international market research, we're destined to flounder outside our shores.
That hasn't stopped Popcorn from going global, thanks largely to the interest Report is stirring up overseas. She is considering what international niche BrainReserve might someday occupy as a truly "planetary" company. Is she ready? Is the world?
COULD WE FOCUS ON THE EC AND JAPAN FOR THE MOMENT?
We don't have a data base in these countries. Our talent bank is across-the-world census stuff, but I don't talk globally because I really have no way of checking back to consumers. Anything I say now is a guess.
BUT YOU DO TRAVEL? AND THE CORPORATIONS YOU ADVISE ARE MULTINATIONAL, AND DON'T LIMIT THEMSELVES TO THE U.S. MARKET?