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MICROTRENDS Press
The Critical 1%
Forbes - August 28, 2007, By Mark J. Penn
The big story today is small trends. Really small trends. These so-called "microtrends" are often counterintuitive, usually followed by 1% or less of the population, but they are pursued passionately and are fundamentally reshaping our society.
Think about it. On a planet of 6.6 billion people, or in a nation of 400 million, 1% is more than enough to generate a new social movement, a successful product, a best-selling book, a new religion or a significant political force.
Yet this 1% is often obscured by conventional wisdom that follows very predictable but often mistaken patterns and paths. Never has marketing been more oriented toward youth and yet our society has never been older. Never have we been so obsessed with emotional marketing while consumers have become feature oriented, combing through hundreds of pages of Web sites when making purchasing decisions. Never has family life been so strongly depicted as the center of our lives while people are choosing to work more and more, even after they achieve affluence.
In fact, the whole way we look at people and their choices is changing. In the old model we assumed that consumers made their choices in their 20s and 30s and stuck with them for the rest of their lives. The logic was, if they chose Bounty when they were young, they would be Bounty users forever, and so the need to market or communicate to the older generation was deemed almost irrelevant.
But today the baby boomers are making a whole new set of choices and are up for grabs again. They are living second lives after their kids leave for college--working more years, adapting to technology, sometimes dating again--some are even having a new round of kids.
And the traditional landscape of class, age, religion and geography is giving way to a whole new array of choice based on shared personal tastes and convictions. We are moving swiftly from the Ford economy, where the idea was to mass merchandise on a low-cost, standardized basis, to the Starbucks economy, where the organizing principal is to improve personal satisfaction based on the niching of America. If the Boston Tea Party were held today, 101 varieties of tea would be dumped into the harbor.
Today's microtrend hunters have to be ready to abandon their own prejudices, sift through the data and find the small, new, intense groups that may never grow beyond 1% but that will play an critical role in shaping tomorrow's zeitgeist. Take YouTube. You or I may never make and post a video, but YouTube users were at the center of one of the recent Democratic Presidential debates. YouTube users asked the questions and drove the agenda. One video question in particular--on whether the next president should meet unconditionally with five dictators--reverberated around the world.
This explosion of personal choice is creating new opportunities but also new pitfalls. Five million American households have become middle-class second home buyers--and they are a new marketplace not just for loans but for gardeners, caretakers, pest services and bill-paying services. But they could also be at the heart of the credit crunch and the most affected by the subprime crisis. If home prices start heading down but interest rates go up, the new American dream of two garages for every car may just backfire and push new personal bankruptcies to all-time highs.
Perhaps the easiest way to spot a microtrend is to look at the opposite of what most people are doing. In today's culture, some people rebel and choose the opposite of almost every major trend--and do so deliberately, with real fervor. If drinking purified bottled water is off the charts, certain others will turn to new high-caffeine drinks in record numbers. If the majority of teens are texting nonstop on their cellphones, others are going to take up knitting. While some of the rich are throwing their money around, a quietly emerging class of "shy millionaires" is keeping their financial status firmly in the closet.
Ultimately, the old model of our lives being shaped by trends that reach a tipping point, or of America being a melting pot that erases our differences, is being replaced by the new model of America becoming a collage of choice-driven communities.
These new communities now cut across all the old boundaries and generate not only new marketplaces but new connections that can, counter-intuitively, bring us closer together while recognizing we are increasingly different and are happy staying that way.
Mark J. Penn is the worldwide CEO of Burson-Marsteller and the author, with E. Kinney Zalesne, of Mircotrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes.
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