Trend Tracking : Claims of Peerless Predictions by Popcorn, Yankelovich and Other Culture Watchers Draw High-Paying Clients--and a Few Arched Eyebrows
We predicted aging was gonna happen, we predicted herbs were gonna happen, we predicted foodaceuticals were gonna happen. . . . We predicted the four-wheel-drive vehicle based on fantasy adventure, backpacks, hiking boots, that whole Western thing. . . . We predicted Bill Clinton . . . low-fat eating . . . the company with a conscience, the corporate soul. . . . We just predicted everything. Faith Popcorn
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Pulling her executive clients out of the office and down to the streets, Faith Popcorn takes them on “TrendTreks” to food stores and toy stores, bakeries, restaurants and boutiques.
“We say, ‘This is what the Gap is making,’ ” she says, “ ‘and here’s the new Armani A/X, and this is Southwestern-style cuisine.’ They need to know what the consumer’s exposed to.”
It may all be new to the client, but nothing they see will surprise Popcorn. She probably predicted it--or says she did.
Popcorn’s field is trend forecasting, but it’s not unlike soothsaying--what people get when they ask Jeane Dixon each January what she sees in her star charts for the coming year. It’s Popcorn predicting that people would stay home more--”cocooning,” she called it. It’s John Naisbitt predicting the demise of socialism worldwide. It’s Gerald Celente predicting that baby boomers would run for office last year.
Critics may find such predictions obvious, not very useful and maybe not even accurate. But “they’re answering questions people want answers to, and the fact that they’re 99% wrong doesn’t mean anybody can do any better,” says UCLA sociologist Jeffrey Alexander. “It must be useful, because people pay an awful lot of money for it.”
This kind of sooth is indeed costly, even in Fortune 500 circles. Popcorn’s TrendPacks cost subscribers $12,000 a year. “Sponsors” of the Yankelovich Monitor pay $38,000, $32,000 for renewals. Celente charges $185 for four eight-page newsletters, his Trends Journal.
Soothsaying also has more practitioners. The old school, with Daniel Yankelovich as its dean, may read, poll or summarize, discerning significant changes in people and institutions. They produce statistics, analyses and reports.
Glitzier groups read some, observe more and brainstorm lots in a search for trends. They broadcast their perceptions, then boast of their accuracy, following the credo, “I inflate, therefore I am.”
However they get there, “the end result is the same thing,” says Florence Skelly, Yankelovich’s partner for 35 years: “What’s going on in the damn country and what’s going to happen.”
This trend to prediction is often traced to Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book “Future Shock,” describing an anxiety state precipitated by today’s “greatly accelerated rate of change.” Only recognizing and defining the changes, and anticipating them, could bring some relief.
Seems self-evident now, but when a group in Washington formed the World Future Society in 1966 to discuss such topics and members called themselves futurists, “people thought of us as science-fiction types,” says president Edward Cornish. Now “people are very aware that the pace of change has increased vastly, and they have to adjust. They need some way of reaching out to what’s going to happen.”
In 1970, market researchers Yankelovich, Skelly and Arthur White came up with an ongoing “Monitor” of social trends that affected consumer behavior. They had discovered that the consumer didn’t respond as much to a product’s characteristics as to outside influences. If women weren’t buying Playtex girdles, for example, it wasn’t because the girdles provided more or less “control,” but because of “social changes (that) raised questions about girdle-wearing, questions of how women wanted to look, their views on sex,” says Skelly.
Soon they had identified 35 key social trends, were tracking them through consumer interviews, and were publishing the findings annually. As expected, it was compelling stuff to business--and became more so as business got bigger and more remote from consumers.
By the mid-1980s, says Skelly, “everybody and his uncle was in it.” But they all tracked trends a little differently.
Naisbitt identified “megatrends” by measuring the amount of space given various topics in newspapers nationwide. If the environment was getting more and more column inches, civil rights was getting less and less, indicating the country’s changing interest.
The technique somehow gave him a relentless positive bent. His 1982 “Megatrends” called the 1980s “a fantastic time to be alive” and the 1990s, he said in “Megatrends 2000,” would be “the most challenging yet most exciting decade in the history of civilization.”
The Yankelovich Partners, meanwhile, stick to polling. The number of trends they tracked swelled to 59 and fell back to 41. The Monitor’s trend categories are still sociological (Personalization, New Romanticism, Concern About Environment). The analytic fodder is still 2,500 consumer interviews.
With new management, however--no longer including Yankelovich, Skelly and White--there are new language and new principles, an odd mix of 1980s MBA-speak and 1960s social responsibility. The firm still promises business “actionable marketing strategies,” “longitudinal analysis of trends” and “deliverables.” But it’s also interested in “the big picture,” says CEO James Taylor, in “the wishes and dreams of (all) Americans.” In fact, “we see ourselves as spokespersons for the American underclass,” he says.
Even the World Future Society--a scholarly group--gets into some prophesy, but carefully. At most, says Cornish, “we may consider the possibilities (and) assign a certain likelihood. (But) there’s no question a number of corporations buy the Futurist (magazine) with a view to following the trends for business purposes.”
Trend tracking also has a “more exotic strain,” says Yankelovich, who has formed a new company with Florence Skelly. “Everything now has taken on the trappings of show business.”
The most famous proponent is Faith Popcorn, who came out of advertising, renamed herself (from Plotkin), applied a talent for sound bites to defining trends and became, said Newsweek, the “most interviewed woman on the planet.”
In catchy words, with lots of capitals, she defined “Cocooning” (staying home), “Cashing Out” (quitting the rat race) and “Down-Aging” (acting youthful). As illustration, she sends out bimonthly “TrendPacks”--samples of current trends that might include ethnic music, snack chips, a perfume kit, herbal pills, a crack vial (empty).
Popcorn’s staff at BrainReserve interviews 3,000 people, including a “TalentBank” of VIPs. But more often, they’re “Brailling the culture”--a Popcorn methodology that involves reading newspapers and magazines, watching TV and trying trendy restaurants. And “everyone here is required to see every top-run movie, like ‘Total Recall,’ ” she says.
Popcorn is doubtless an example of what Celente, who founded the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., calls the “rash of ‘pop’ trend forecasters” stuck on “one-dimensional” techniques. His, he contends, is a “multidimensional Globalnomic methodology.”
Globalnomics led the institute to predict that women in power will wear more red, that some people will work at home because they have lost their jobs, that men will give up neckties because they’re uncomfortable and unhealthy, that money will be a motivating factor in the social, political and economic arenas, and--last year--that Ross Perot’s victory was “imminent.”
Celente, who came to the field from industrial lobbying, tracks not 10, not 40, but 300 trend categories. He says he even tries “to live the life of the trends that I track. We take naps here. We meditate. I work in the garden.”
The promotional types have turned consultation into performance art. Most trend trackers will speak at trade conventions and sales meetings. They may also do individual consulting on “a general picture of social and consumer trends,” says Skelly.
Celente does tutorials. Feeling responsible as “a master of my trade” to share his methodology, he teaches companies like Nestle, DuPont, Kimberly-Clark how to track trends themselves.
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Basically, he shows them how to read the newspaper “with a purpose.” They shouldn’t follow stories on Somalia, for example, because “it doesn’t have trend implications. It’s such a poor country, (our involvement) is only temporary, and we’re not going to be bogged down there.”
Plane crash in Portugal? Never mind “the bodies on the Tarmac.” Airlines are a valid trend category, Celente says, “so read the article, but only to see if there was a maintenance problem, a company in bankruptcy. . . .”
Companies that want more from Popcorn than a TrendPack can order a “TrendView” seminar about the future, a two-hour “BrainJam” on a particular issue, or a one- or two-day “TalentBank Interface” to “explore a theme” such as the future of auto styles.
After the process and under the puff is the product--the predictions. Popcorn claims a “documented 95% accuracy rate,” adding, “I was being modest,” but the documentation is a list of her best perceptions. No one talks about the ones that got away. And no one keeps track of the trackers. Who goes back later, says one corporate manager, “and asks, ‘Hey, did cocooning really happen?’ ”
Many forecasts are foolproof because they consist simply of common sense. Says New York publishing consultant Judith Daniels, diplomatically, “None of it ever flies in the face of what we know.”
When Celente predicts “a major technoboost” in the 1990s, including such advances as “visual” phones, he’s hardly alone. And when he advises business that President Clinton’s Cabinet is important and “you better learn everything you can about these people,” even a teen-ager might say, “Well, duh !”
Some pronouncements make less sense. Popcorn predicted that nonviolence would be a theme of the 1990s, for example, and Naisbitt assured readers that the wealth of developed countries will lead to global affluence.
Some are just misrepresented. One of Celente’s biggest boasts is that he predicted Perot’s presidential candidacy, on page 67 of his book, “Trend Tracking.” In fact, he only quoted Perot on corporate politics at General Motors while discussing the failure of two-party politics. His words: “I juxtaposed Ross Perot as maverick with the prediction of a third party.”
Much is just showmanship, always an asset in the soothsaying business. Everyone knows one danger of wholesale layoffs is that a corporation may cut muscle with the fat. But Celente said it neatly, predicting that corporate downsizing might become “dumbsizing.”
“I had a trend called at-homeness ,” recalls Florence Skelly. “Faith Popcorn calls it cocooning . Which do you remember? The ones you remember are the phrase coiners, the popularizers.”
You may also end up believing, if prophecy is self-fulfilling. “The more they predict something,” says Daniels, “and somebody does another article on the prediction, the more it becomes truth.”
Whether it’s useful is another question. Even Popcorn says that if her clients did well in the terrible ‘80s, it was “not necessarily because of me, (but because they) make a better product, give a better service.”
The basic trend data offer guides, not orders to action. Nor does trend tracking always provide reasons for the shifts. Says one marketer: “You want to know whether people are staying home because they feel safer or because they don’t have money to go out.” With all the new home electronics, they may also just “have more alternatives of things to do at home,” says Janet Lever, professor of sociology at Cal State L.A.
Still, all of it--the tracking, the predictions, even the promotion--is “thought-provoking,” says Lever. “But so was the movie ‘Blade Runner,’ which was a predictor of the future. As long as they don’t say it’s science, or more than it is, it’s interesting.”
The exotic strain does have its place. “There may be some justification in turning to people who are provocateurs,” says Yankelovich, “to get ideas, to shake things up.
“You need to use your imagination,” he adds, “but you also need to keep your feet on the ground.”
