Economist.com - September 20, 2007
IT IS common knowledge that Latino influence in the United States is big and growing. Less well known is that a significant sub-group—some 10m people—of the country's Latino population is not Catholic but Protestant. Less known still is the influence those Protestant Hispanics had on the 2004 presidential election: the sharp increase in their support for George Bush after 2000 (while the voting pattern of Catholic Hispanics remained unchanged) was a key force in his re-election.
Meet a microtrend, one of a multitude of fast-growing, below-the-radar forces that, Mark Penn argues, are changing America. The land of the big (and home of the megatrend) turns out in important and often unexpected ways to be the land of the small. Microtrends can move markets as well as turn elections.
Mr Penn has for years been taking his trend-spotter's magnifying glass to opinion polls and other data in search of small but intense signals that can give a decisive advantage to those who detect them. Politicians from Bill Clinton to Tony Blair have sought his advice; he is currently the main strategist for Hillary Clinton's presidential bid. As chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, a public-relations firm, he advises some of the world's biggest companies. Once a phenomenon or interest group amounts to 1% of the population—a critical threshold for microtrends—the Pennometer starts twitching.
It twitches, for example, at the discovery that more than 3m Americans are now "extreme commuters", travelling more than 90 minutes to work every day and forming a ready market for in-car entertainment as well as a voting block that will react particularly strongly against any increase in fuel taxes. In all, Mr Penn and his co-author Kinney Zalesne have collected 75 microtrends, covering a range of topics from technology and teens to food and fashion. A few of these trends are perhaps too "micro" to be worth including. But most are intriguing and many are surprising. Astonishingly, 1% of young Californians say they expect to become "snipers".
Observing Americans' propensity to come together in numerous interest groups is as old as Alexis de Tocqueville. But two things are new, and may account for a multiplication of microtrends. First, the internet is making it far easier for people with niche interests to find fellow enthusiasts. Second, there seems to be a greater tolerance for unorthodox individual choices, reflected in trends as diverse as a rise in left-handedness and a sea-change in attitudes to mixed-race marriage.
What broader picture emerges from Mr Penn's pointillist observations? As more and more small groups define themselves more sharply than ever, America is no longer a melting pot. It is becoming a nation of niches. Indeed, some will see a cause for concern in the apparent trend towards increasing fragmentation.
One worrier is Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. In "Republic.com 2.0" he points to the danger of niches becoming "echo chambers" in which only the views of like-minded people are heard, thanks to the internet making it easy for people to filter information into a personalised selection, "the Daily Me". A healthy democracy, he argues, depends on exposure to diverse or unexpected opinions. If Americans wall themselves off from topics and opinions they prefer to avoid, narrowing their horizons, their democracy will suffer.
But niches do not need to imply narrow-mindedness. On the contrary, as Mr Sunstein accepts, the internet holds far more promise than risk. Mr Penn, for his part, remains an optimist. He sees in microtrends a triumph of tolerance and individual choice. Certainly the implications are in many cases anything but small. All the usual assumptions about the coming crisis in America's Social Security (pensions) system will have to be rethought if the trend towards working beyond the normal retirement age gathers pace. And Mr Penn's skill in picking pertinent microtrends could help decide whether or not his candidate becomes America's first female president.