Faith Popcorn

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 resemble 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, 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 you, where consumers could choose their own avatars 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 forecast virtual reality vacations and said 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 Faith Popcorn to envision a viable future for the post office, an engagement that was criticized by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma in his annual list of 100 examples of "wasteful" spending.[19]

• The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life. New York: Doubleday, 1991. ISBN 978-0-385-40000-8
• with Lys Marigold. Clicking: 16 Trends to Future Fit Your Life, Your Work, and Your Business. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ISBN 978-0-88730-694-5
• EVEolution: The Eight Truths of Marketing to Women (co-authored with Lys Marigold),
• with Adam Hanft. The Dictionary of the Future: The Words, Terms and Trends That Define the Way We'll Live, Work and Talk, New York: Hyperion, 2001. ISBN 978-0-7868-7007-3

Popcorn lives in Manhattan and Wainscott, Long Island.[20] She is single and has two adopted children.[8][20]

• Faith Popcorn official website
• Faith Popcorn at IMDb