An Environment of Uncertainty

The unsettling recent headlines--that some tap water may be linked to miscarriages--alarmed consumers but was no surprise to trend forecaster Faith Popcorn.

It further verified a key emerging trend that she’s been tracking. Although not fully developed yet (“It’s still at the ‘drift’ stage,” she said), it is important enough to be given a Popcorn-esque label: AtmosFear.

“It’s about people being scared of basic things that used to nurture them, like food, air and water,” she explains. “You know, the chickens, the salmonella, the E. coli, the mad cow disease . . . organic sales are soaring. But even that isn’t safe, because people are confused about the standards.”

Is anything safe?

“When you start worrying about the basic things, like apple juice, or a fast-food hamburger or a salad . . . it seems like every day there is something else and nobody has put the whole package together,” Popcorn said fretfully.

Popcorn (nee Plotkin), a market consultant with an advertising background and a shrewd knack for prediction, specializes in putting things together. As chairwoman of BrainReserve, the consulting firm she founded in Manhattan almost 25 years ago, she commands hefty fees for business seminars and counsels such Fortune 500 clients as Bell Atlantic, IBM and PepsiCo on what’s happening and what they should do about it (“The Nostradamus of Marketing,” declared Fortune magazine).

Having secured her reputation as a trend guru by predicting the rise of “cocooning” (her label) in the early 1980s, Popcorn continues to monitor the changing contemporary landscape with the vigilance of an air traffic controller at the radar screen.

“We have a staff of 24 and a computer bank of 5,000 people in a wide range of occupations. We check hundreds of magazines, books and newspapers. We can’t look at anything without analyzing it. It’s disgusting.”

With her co-author, Lys Marigold, Popcorn was in Los Angeles recently to promote the paperback publication of their 1996 book “Clicking” (HarperBusiness), in which they pinpointed 16 major trends--with snappy names like Clanning, Fantasy Adventure and Icon-Toppling--involving consumer moods and attitudes.

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In the Popcorn world, a trend is not a passing fad, but a long-lived force that is shaping the future inexorably and must not be ignored.

“We tell big companies to build their factories based on trends,” she said. “We tell them, ‘This is how it’s going to go,’ so they can gear up for it.”

(If you gear up in a way that takes advantage of the trend, you are “clicking.”)

For the paperback, Popcorn has added AtmosFear to the list.

“It is so pervasive that canny marketers are already seizing on the opportunities it presents,” she wrote, noting the appearance of elaborate home air purification systems, new antibacterial lotions and creams, and germ-fighting toys.

Sipping iced coffee at the Farmers Market, Popcorn elaborated on her scenario. Despite her colorful name (which she adopted years ago at the suggestion of an ad agency boss) and the purple streak in her spiky auburn hair, her rapid-fire conversational style is more thoughtful than flamboyant.

“We think that ‘source-protected’ food will be the next wave. We are advising our major clients to start disclosing ingredients on their packages. Right now Milk-Bone is listing that everything in Milk-Bone is pure.” (Pet products are a big marketing arena these days, she said.)

Popcorn has had her eye on our food supply for some time, having touched on the subject in her first book, “Popcorn Report” (Doubleday), co-written with Marigold in 1991.

“We talked about finding where your food comes from, like wanting to know what field that cow was grazing in and what was the cow injected with. And everybody laughed,” Marigold recalls.

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But today, Popcorn said, such disclosures can give companies a competitive jump on the market. She had just come from a business convention in San Francisco where she shared the platform with a spokesman from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

“When he said that they only buy from a cooperative dairy that feeds no hormones to cows, 17,000 people cheered. This is what people want to hear.”

And despite new labeling laws, Marigold noted, there is no way for the supermarket shopper in a global age to tell where the red leaf lettuce came from.

“Maybe from Mexico--where you just traveled and were told not to eat the lettuce.”

In the face of such uncertainty, retailers who can vouch that the produce is organic, or the T-shirts weren’t stitched by child laborers, have pulled ahead of a system filled with mistrust. Even commercial airplanes should post cards disclosing pertinent information about the crew’s experience and the plane itself, Marigold suggested.

“Who wants to get on a plane that is 40 years old and had been in the Middle East for 10 years?”

The very pressure of such worries has led to another major Popcorn trend: Pleasure Revenge--the rebellion of breaking all the health rules laid out in Being Alive (yet another Popcorn trend) and reveling in such unhealthy joys as eating steak, drinking martinis and smoking cigars.

“I see the nation in a hedonistic moment,” Popcorn said. “We’re thinking, ‘Oh, my god, we can’t trust the food source, the water, we can’t trust the doctor, we are using nurse practitioners more. . . .’ People just sort of throw up their hands and say, ‘Screw this. I’m having a steak!’ ”

She is unperturbed that many of her trends are contradictory. Can the Save Our Society trend, which finds consumers recycling and buying solar water heaters, be reconciled with the Fantasy Adventure trend, with its booming sales of monster four-wheel-drive vehicles even for urban commuting?

“I don’t start these trends,,” Popcorn answered. “I just reflect them.”

Sometimes, she said, the paradoxes merge, in a sort of yin and yang, such as running two miles, then coming home to eat a pint of Haagen-Dazs. “Fitness and fatness. We are complex animals and we don’t behave in consistent ways.”

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What each trend shares, according to the optimistic Popcorn, is an opportunity to get ahead in the marketplace. BrainReserve now has branched into two divisions, she said, “the consulting division that helps corporations reposition for the future, and Popcorn Products: books, tapes, seminars and anything else that’s not consulting.” (“Clicking” has sold 150,000 copies, indicating the mass appeal of her upbeat advice.)

Whereas individual readers might consult “Clicking” for personal direction as to starting a timely business or making a career change, corporations have one basic question: What new products or services will people buy?

Popcorn guides them to the FemaleThink trend, which, she said, is the most important in her book. It’s no surprise that women and men view the world in different ways (women are looking for relationships, she said, while men are looking for action). But American retailers have yet to realize that men and women don’t shop for the same things and don’t buy for the same reasons. Too many companies still employ OldThink, which virtually ignores women.

“We say that in order to market to a woman, you need to form an intelligent and respectful relationship with her, and very few companies know how to do that.” One of the few success stories she cites is Saturn, the car company whose no-haggle pricing policy typifies a sensitivity to female shoppers and has paid off.

This FemaleThink trend is so compelling that Popcorn is going to rename it Eve-Olution. It will be the subject for her next book, which will offer a set of rules for cashing in on the women’s market.

“Let me give you some statistics. Eighty percent of consumers are women, female-run companies employ more people than the global Fortune 500 combined, women are opening their own companies at twice the rate of men.

“It’s major! It’s great!” The qualities of a Popcorn trend.

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PopcornSpeak

AtmosFear: Being scared of things that are supposed to help you, such as food, air and water.

Pleasure Revenge: Reveling in unhealthy delights, like steak, martinis and cigars.

FemaleThink: Marketing consumer goods with a sensitivity to female shoppers.