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MICROTRENDS Press
Microtrendies Are Taking Over World
The Sunday Times - August 26, 2007, By Sarah Baxter
ARE you a geek, obsessed with the latest gadgets, yet consider yourself cool and have hundreds of friends? An extreme commuter, whose long journey is turbocharging the caffeine industry? A single woman, who is surprised to be on the shelf but has lots of gay friends? Or a Lat, part of a couple who “live apart together” in separate households?
If so you are part of a microtrend with the power to shape society, according to the polling guru Mark Penn.
The Economist magazine describes Penn as a “polling genius”. He is known in America as the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, but he also played a crucial, below-the-radar role guiding Tony Blair to his third election victory in 2005. Adecade earlier he identified the “soccer mom” as a key voting bloc with the power to swing the electorate behind Bill Clinton.
He doubles as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations firm, advising Micro-soft and Ford. Yet somehow he has managed to carve out time on the side to co-author Microtrends, a book about to come out in America and which will be published by Allen Lane in Britain this October. It has enthusiastic endorsements from both Bill Clinton and Bill Gates.
Talking in his office near the White House, Penn has the slightly tousled air of a “thirty-winker”, the growing microtrend of sleep-averse night owls and early risers.
Baroness Thatcher and Madonna started the sleep starvation trend among overachievers, but as he points out, those who get by on 30 winks now include the new generation of internet addicts. The sheer joy of number-crunch-ing keeps Penn awake and there is, he says, a “continual cross-pol-lination” between his work in politics and consumer affairs.
His book is itself part of a microtrend that has included Stephen Levitt’s bestselling Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. It is about the small shifts in tastes and behaviour that can have huge knock-on effects. New niche markets have sprung up through globalisation and the internet, and people have become more sophisticated about the choices they can make.
“By the time a trend hits 1%, it is ready to spawn a hit movie, bestselling book or new political movement,” Penn believes. It used to be that individual choices were largely hidden from the rest of the “herd” and could not coalesce into a microtrend. Marketeers manipulated choice and created short-lived vogues.
Now, however, “in today’s mass societies, it takes only 1% of people making a dedicated choice – contrary to the main-stream’s choice – to create a movement that can change the world”. Half the fun in spotting microtrends lies in being counter-intuitive. “People get so wedded to conventional wisdom that they don’t see the changes happening right in front of them,” Penn says.
One day, he predicts, business-men will finally realise there is a demand for a chain of hygienic, upmarket tattoo parlours. “Why can’t they be more like Star-bucks?” he wonders, given their increasingly middle-class clientele. In a flight of fancy, he imagines Angelina Jolie and David Beckham being hired to advertise body art on television. And why not? “This is a potential billion-dollar marketplace,” he says.
Given the ripe age of baby-boomers, he believes it is time the views of the elderly were courted. “I don’t think anything has ever been so youth-oriented at a time when so many people are older.” But there are also some huge misconceptions about young people that Penn is determined to clear up.
First is the myth of the lonely, spotty techno-geek. “A funny thing happened on the way to the Star Trek convention,” Penn notes. “Technology crossed over to being a thing for extroverts.”
The consumers of the new generation of mobile phones, iPods, and music players such as Zune, which connect to other people’s headsets, are the super-cool social networkers of their generation. Losers aren’t racing to buy the latest gadgets; they are sitting at home waiting for their old landline phones to ring.
Sixty per cent of the most enthusiastic tech users are extroverted, according to a poll cited by Penn; 41% of techies like to “get things going” at parties compared with only 24% of reluctant users. “If the old cliché was that techno-geeks have no friends, now it is the case that techno-geeks have a crazy, impossible number of friends,” Penn says.
One of the most popular people on MySpace is Tila Tequila, the scantily clad celebrity, whose site has attracted a quarter of a billion visitors. Asked how much time she spent online, Tequila replied: “I spend about 24 hours a day on there, pretty much.” New technology is having a huge impact in breaking down class barriers. Take the rise in internet marriages. “Previously people would only get married in their closely drawn, religious and social circles,” Penn says. Now they can meet across nations, races and classes.
And whereas the affair in The Graduate between sophisticated Anne Bancroft and nerdy Dustin Hoffman was once seen as scandalous, older women – whom he calls “cougars” – now regularly date younger men. Think Hollywood actor Geena Davis, 51, married to 35-year-old Reza Jarrahy; or Susan Sarandon, 60, whose boyfriend Tim Robbins is 48.
Behind every trend lies a reason. Increasing divorce rates and longer lifespans mean women are reentering the dating market beyond their twenties. Fertility treatment helps them to have children in the premenopause years. Their rise in the workplace makes them less dependent on a male breadwinner.
As for those single women who are ageing – and perhaps getting less fussy about potential mates – have they ever wondered about the impact of men who are out of the closet? When Penn looked at the data, he found that gay men outnumber lesbians by about 2 to 1.
“Numerically speaking, when the music stops in heterosexual America, there are a lot of women left standing,” he says. And when that happens, new trends come to the fore such as the rise of single mothers by choice; and the replacement of children by pets as companions, spawning a huge market in puppy sunscreen, “pawfume”, kitty nail polish and luxury kennels.
Men are also becoming husbands and fathers at a later age, launching further trends, such as the “old new dad” – many of whom are “do-over dads” on their second or third marriages. Penn is one himself, having fathered his youngest child at 48.
Marketing companies and politicians should note that the old new dads are likely to pass on a love of wine rather than beer to their children, to prefer safe cars to speed, and to foster a more conservative outlook in their kids.
Penn notes that old dads have already become a political force in Britain – remember Batman from Fathers 4 Justice, who climbed onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace? Together with older mums, they have also fostered the rise of the university-educated nanny, who can help their children get ahead in the educational rat race and has delayed childbearing herself.
Penn considers Britain to be in the vanguard of several microtrends, such as extreme commuting, with workers buying homes outside London and other cities in ever-wider circles and shut-tling on the Eurostar between London, Paris and Brussels.
This, in turn, has fostered the rise of the commuter marriage, with dual-career couples living and working in separate locations. Some farsighted businesses are now supplying fast food that fits into cupholders.
Britons, Penn believes, are the trendsetters for one of Europe’s fastest-growing lifestyles: Lats, or unmarried couples living apart together. “Lat is a nice, clear way to say, ‘I love you – from over here, in my own castle, where I am king’.”
One of the best things about Britain, he suggests, is its easy-going attitudes. “The world is not becoming a melting pot, it’s becoming a collage, and it will put a real premium on people becoming tolerant of other people’s prejudices.”
There is a downside to microtrends. It might be easy to find “a million who want to try your grapefruit diet”, but “if Bin Laden could convert just 1% of the world’s 1 billion Muslims to take up violence, that would be 10m terrorists, a group that could dwarf even the largest armies on earth”.
Happily, he concludes, there is no sign of that. He has spotted a trend that shows most terrorists are well educated and, contrary to conventional wisdom, poorer people may be “too smart” to blow themselves up.
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