Faith Popcorn about adapting Brands to consumer trends

I didn’t know Faith Popcorn was still active –I’m one of those who bought her book ‘Clicking’ back in 1996 without ever reading it… Coming across a recent lecture of her at the Ideacity10 conference, I must conclude that her powerful trend watching skills hasn’t diminished a bit, and it adapted quite well to the current world.

In fact it shouldn’t come as a surprise, since she collects all kind if input on trends from thousands of people worldwide, through her website (http://www.faithpopcorn.com/). As an example: one Japanese contact pointed out a very successful small shop in Tokyo. The reason for its success lies in the fact that if a product runs out, the shopkeeper wouldn’t build new supplies. The scarcity of the goods makes customers crazy about them. This is what Faith calls the ‘short line’.

This sounds more like a smart business idea rather than a trend. It might become a trend if a substantial proportion of businesses would adopt the idea. Not likely…

Still, in her lecture Faith points out other trends which clearly are relevant and impactful:

• More informed and (hence) demanding consumers;
• Brain chips;
• Icon toppling (disbelieve and skepticism against ‘stars’ and ‘guru’s’ –though some other trends would contradict this, according to me);
• ‘You are what you share’ (your internet profile, quite an interesting one to develop indeed)

From all this she draws a compelling conclusion: successful marketing and branding nowadays is not so much about messaging and packaging, instead a company needs to get embedded into a (sub-)culture. For instance, every self-respecting creative mind would think ‘Apple’ when buying a laptop (or rather: he wouldn’t think about it at all, he wouldn’t even consider buying another brand).

Easier said than done, but it is worthwhile thinking about it when designing a marketing or branding strategy…