Faith Popcorn | |
---|---|
Born | Faith Plotkin May 11, 1943 New York City |
Alma mater | New York University (BA) |
Occupation | Futurist |
Employer | Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve |
Known for | The Popcorn Report, Clicking, EVEolution,The Dictionary of the Future |
Children | 2 |
Website |
faithpopcorn |
Faith Popcorn (born Faith Plotkin, May 11, 1943) [1] is a futurist, author, and founder and CEO of the marketing consulting firm BrainReserve. She has written three best selling books: [2] [3]The Popcorn Report (1991), Clicking (1996), and EVEolution (2000).
Born as Faith Plotkin, [4] [5] she later legally changed her name to "Faith Popcorn." [4] She was born in New York City, where both of her parents were lawyers [6] and spent her early childhood in Shanghai before returning to the United States. She attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York City, [2] followed by New York University. [4] Accepted into NYU Law School, she decided instead to go into advertising in the early 1970s, which she said she considered to be more glamorous. [7]
After working in advertising for eight years, [2] she founded the marketing consulting firm BrainReserve in 1974. [8] It works with companies to identify future trends that will affect their business. [9] Popcorn is reported to have advised Coca-Cola, in 1981, to go into bottled water [10] and to have told Kodak in the late 1980s to go into digital instead of print. [11]
She coined terms like " cocooning" ("the impulse to stay inside when the outside gets too tough and scary", such as turning a home into a nest) and "Cashing Out" ("the impulse to change one's life to a slower and more rewarding pace", sometimes manifested by people who quit corporate jobs). [12] Her company created a "TalentBank" [12] of 10,000 experts who provide forecasts about trends across many topics. [13] It also analyzes newspapers, magazine and other sources, and conducts thousands of consumer interviews to spot future trends. [4] [13]
In a series of nine 2006 predictions of major trends, she forecast a cultural trend toward more physical contact, including "mechanized hugging booths." [14] She also said that "second hand nostalgia" would become a trend and that advances in genetics might allow people to custom design pets with bits of their own DNA so their dogs and cats resembled them. [14] Other examples from this series of predictions included "mood tuning" products, such as clothing infused with "neuro-chemicals" to enhance confidence or mental acuity, and demand for exercising "brain fitness", possibly manifesting itself in "brain trainers" to exercise recall or "retort coaches" to help people sharpen their wit. [14]
A 2008 Los Angeles Times entertainment section article, following Popcorn's predictions over a period of five years, credited her with identifying trends such as "food coaches" and "transcouture". [15] In 2014, she predicted to The Hollywood Reporter that films would become immersive events, taking place all around the viewer, who could choose their own avatar as characters. [16] She also predicted fan films, similar to fan fiction. [16] In 2015, she renewed her 1991 prediction that "humanoid robots" would become companions and workers. [8] At an IBM-sponsored conference, she predicted robots would replace one third of jobs in the developed world and that governments would initiate a "disemployment tax" as an incentive to keep people employed. She forecasted virtual reality vacations and said that the average adult would work for several companies simultaneously. [17]
Business book author William A. Sherden takes a skeptical view of her ideas about cocooning. He provides statistics showing double-digit percentage growth in activities outside the home in the five years following her prediction. [18] The U.S. Postal Service paid $566,000 to Popcorn to envision a viable future for the post office, an engagement that was criticized by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma in a list of 100 examples of "wasteful" spending. [19]
Popcorn lives in Manhattan and Wainscott, Long Island. [20] She is single and has two adopted children. [8] [20]