Life Style in the ‘90s, According to Popcorn

To dispense first with the inevitable:

“I do not discuss my name.”

Faith Popcorn was impatient. She has been asked about her, shall we say, distinctive surname no fewer than 10 million times.

“It’s on my passport,” she said.

So what if it was once Papacorne, the imaginative product of an overzealous immigration officer and an Italian great-grandfather named Corne and fondly known as Papa? Suddenly Faith Popcorn brightened, and the smile that spread across her face revealed the tiniest gap between her front teeth.

“I think people should change their names every 10 years,” she declared.

Aha! That notion sounds mightily like a candidate for status as a Trend. And though her skill as a repositioner of failing products and her expertise at new product development are what earn annual revenues of well over $20 million for BrainReserve, the marketing and consulting firm she founded here 13 years ago, it is Popcorn’s uncanny ability to forecast

Doing Her Homework

Poring over 265 periodicals--”everything from the Utne Reader, the Reader’s Digest of the counterculture, to TV Guide”--and conducting in-depth interviews with about 2,000 consumers across the country each year, Popcorn portends shifts in the American psyche that both mirror and move the marketplace.

“If you benchmark what we have been saying for the last 10 years,” Popcorn said, “95% of what we have been saying is accurate.”

Popcorn leaned across her desk, a functional, geometric object in an uncluttered room painted pale trendy gray. Modesty was not at issue here this morning, clearly: “That is extremely high,” she said. “Sometimes it even surprises me.”

For example:

Shoulder pads. Seven years ago, Popcorn let it be known that women would start paying big bucks to look like linebackers. Preventive medicine was another of her prognostications. Ditto the return of flashy cars. When she began using the word parenting three years ago, people looked at her oddly and allowed they did not know about that particular gerund.

Popcorn was among the first to warn marketers that frozen soy bean curd might not send consumers into a high-calorie cloud of universal ecstasy. Tofutti, she augured, simply didn’t taste good enough. Sure enough, before long, there was Tofutti Brand president David Mintz admitting that supermarket freezer space was not unrestrictedly forthcoming for his product.

Long before the advent of “Golden Girls,” back as early as 1980, Popcorn foretold the popularity of older TV stars.

That same pre-VCR-boom year, she quite accurately prophesied a decade that would bring in-home media chambers, a declining divorce rate and the rise of salt-free products.

Barely was the first carbonated bubble in the can but that Popcorn said New Coke would fizzle. “The marketing fiasco of the decade” was exactly how she described it, two days after the beverage made its much-ballyhooed debut.

These days she’s looking at AIDS, the disease she contends “will be the biggest outside influence to change trends in the ‘90s.” Beyond the predictable changes in sexual mores, the AIDS epidemic will affect how food is packaged--she suggests a “subtle, homey” approach to sanitary seals--and will influence the way men and women want to look, Popcorn said.

“With AIDS, you see, it’s not so great to be thin anymore,” she said. “Within 18 months, that connection is going to be made.”

But not everyone wants to hear this kind of forecast. “We said this two years ago, to much laughter,” Popcorn said. “It makes people very uncomfortable.”

Holing Up at Home

To avoid discomfort, to stay insulated from “harsh, unpredictable realities” of an increasingly complicated world, people will engage more and more in a practice Popcorn labels “cocooning.” It was among her own circle of acquaintances that she first began observing this habit of shunning fancy clubs and parties, staying away from crowded movie theaters and holing up at home on weekend days and nights. What Popcorn realized was that masses of people seemed to prefer hanging out in sweat clothes and pulling their down comforters up to their noses, the better to seek shelter against an uncontrollable planet.

“At least on a very subliminal level,” Popcorn said, “we realize that the environment is being destroyed, the government is dishonest and somebody has a button that could really blow up us and our children.”

In her view, these cocoons, little in-home wombs that they are, fairly scream out the word safety. As such, the cocoon of the ‘80s and ‘90s is reminiscent of the den of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Indeed, she said, noting the popularity of ‘50s-themed music in a rash of recent movies, “you can figure out what the ‘90s are going to do if you study the ‘40s and ‘50s.”

Hence, Popcorn said, a resurgence of Mom-food, updated for a no-free-time, no-patience generation destined to become still more obsessed with the notion of time management. Microwave meat loaf is among the delicacies she envisions a cocooned-America consuming; that and mashed potatoes, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, apple brown Betty, chewy oatmeal cookies.

Which brings Faith Popcorn to the subject of Food as Trend. To no small extent, she maintains, a society is what it eats. “I always look at food first,” Popcorn said. “It’s a great indicator of what’s happening in the culture.”

Along such avenues of comestibility, it is no coincidence, Popcorn said, that the very same jogging-and-celery-sticks generation has evolved into the calories-be-damned comfort-food generation.

“For every trend,” Popcorn intoned, Oracle-of-Delphi-like, “there is a counter trend.” For example, fitness and fatness. For each ultra-lean runner who may have circled the Central Park reservoir in the last 12 months, Popcorn said, “fatness products actually sold more than fitness products.”

Popcorn herself follows another ongoing trend--”fitness is not just a trend, but the new way of life,” she proclaims--when she works out regularly with her own personal trainer. The result is a firm-looking body, neither svelte nor plump, outfitted today in jade green to match her eyes. Popcorn, divorced, is in her 40s, with short, auburn hair and long red fingernails. She loves high-heeled shoes, wears huge Paloma Picasso earrings and is living testimony to her return-of-the-’40s theory that “makeup is happening.”

Legacy of the Method

Trained first as a Method actress, she learned then to take careful note of her environment. “In Method acting,” she said, “you observe very carefully what is going on around you.” People-watching, in short, became “an obsession, a passion.”

Had she so chosen, said Popcorn, “I could have been a good journalist. But I hate to write.”

Instead, she became creative director and executive vice president of Smith/Greenland Inc., an advertising concern. Thirteen years ago, believing that “clients were not really getting the kind of answers I thought they deserved,” Popcorn established BrainReserve. “Really, in order to solve a client’s problem, you had to tell them which way the world was going.”

Now she has a staff of 20 and an office with an eye-popping view of the World Trade Towers and the same now-pricey lower Manhattan real estate her attorney mother “always said would come back one day.”

But the family penchant for prescience was hardly the backbone of Popcorn’s BrainReserve. Marketing is her metier, Popcorn insists, and trend-watching is simply a sideline, “our umbrella.”

Mixed Reviews

Because Popcorn has a habit of being fairly vocal about it when she opens that umbrella, some people in the frenzied New York advertising world view her predictions with some skepticism. “A flake,” is how one Madison Avenue type succinctly described her. But others are more charitable, lauding her willingness to put her credibility on the line with ideas about the future that may sometimes sound far-fetched.

“It certainly makes sense intellectually,” another adman said, “that if you are looking to create a new product or reposition an existing product (aim it at a different audience), you’ve got to be plugged into the macro trends of our society. Faith does that.”

“We don’t package it, we don’t sell it,” she said of BrainReserve’s “Trend Bank.” “It’s an overview, something that helps provide a strategy into the ‘90s, even into the year 2000.”

Personally, anyway, Popcorn does not restrict that strategy to the marketplace. Politics, too, come under her scrutiny. To explain the elections of 1980 and 1984, she suggests that the need for control, to feel safe, “is why we voted Ronnie into the White House. That’s the only reason.”

For post-Reagan America, she is leaning toward “this guy Nunn,” the senior Democratic senator from Georgia. “That type,” Popcorn said: “reliable, non-flashy, a workaholic, no hype.”

On the flip side, however, Popcorn does not discount the possibility of some glamorous hunk of charisma, “someone in the Kennedy mold,” appearing on the political horizon.

Downsizing Business

Whoever is elected, Popcorn continued, will govern a 1990s America where female MBAs flee the corporate combat zone in order to become entrepreneurs as small businesses make a comeback.

Again, the flip side surfaces, this time in the form of what Popcorn foresees as “individuality/style.” Increasing depersonalization and computerization, reasons Popcorn, will produce “a consumer out there who wants to make a personal statement, who wants something personalized, something fitting his own individual style.”

Popcorn agrees that Californians do see themselves as a kind of collective royal family of trendies.

But here comes the antitrend.

“More people are traveling, going back and forth across the country,” she said. Californians will still start trends, “but not as much as they used to do.”

FAITH POPCORN’S PREDICTIONS FOR THE 1990s

Creating, and maintaining families increasingly will become a “very honored role” for women.

Fewer women will work. They will spend their time at home concentrating on their families. Women who do work will tend to create entrepreneurial roles at or close to home.

Older women will be viewed as very sexy.

Someone will market a cream that will provide a face lift.

Kidnaping of children will stop. Children will be identified with a dental implant or some other device that keys into a satellite associated with a computerized registry.

AIDS will become a major epidemic, and will hit the heterosexual population hard.

Increasing numbers of couples will remain married for life due to fear of AIDS.

Drug use will decrease.

Popularity of hard liquor and mixed drinks will return.

Refrigerators automatically will keep track of their contents. A computer will dial the grocery store, place an order and establish a time for delivery.

“Mom foods” like meat loaf, hot pie, chicken a la king, apple brown Betty and mashed potatoes will become popular again.

Vegetarianism will increase “drastically” due to fear of detrimental effects of fat on health.

Exotic herbs like lemon grass, pesto, curry, cumin and cilantro will increase in popularity.

Unusual vegetables like bok choy, finger bananas and other miniature vegetables will become popular.

Grains will be emphasized in cooking.

Water will be filter treated and a cherished commodity costing $2 a bottle in today’s dollars.

Video systems for TV, movies and video games will be built into cars, with options for map tracking devices that will keep constant track of a vehicle’s position on a map on the screen.

Cars may cost $40,000 to $50,000, but they will last 20 to 40 years., JOHN SNYDER / Los Angeles Times