Mark Penn, CEO of PR firm Burson-Marsteller and Hilary Clinton's chief strategist and pollster, has just released his new book - "Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes" - which makes a data-driven case for how small movements have the greatest potential today for creating societal change.
As the man who identified the "Soccer Moms" pivotal swing audience in Bill Clinton's 1996 presidential campaign, Penn is credited for being able to spot and isolate small trends or patterns of behavior in the environment - which he dubs as "microtrends." His book credits these new, just emerging microtrends as having the potential to shape our future and society.
He gives numerous examples: With so much teen crime we aren't seeing that the youth audience group is succeeding in life as never before. With so much attention on the political power of large religious groups, we find it difficult to grasp that it is the newer, more narrowly focused religious sects that are the fastest-growing.
As technology may have enabled, individuals have more choices today than at any other time in human history and the reasons and patterns for eventual end choices have never been more difficult to predict. But the ability to identify small groups and communities of like-minded people, and communicate effectively with them, is indeed today's primary challenge for marketers and politicians. Mass marketing and mass communications is dead in terms of real impact.
Utilizing "some of the best data available" Penn identifies more than 70 microtrends in business, religion, leisure, politics and family life that are quickly changing the way we work and live. A few of them include:
* People are retiring but continuing to work
* Teens are turning to knitting
* Geeks are becoming the most sociable people around
* Women are driving technology
* Dads are older than ever and spending more times with kids than in the past
To really know what's emerging "out there" Penn says we need "magnifying glasses and microscopes not the naked eye and an eloquent tongue" - and that equates to analyzing markets/audiences with polls, surveys, and statistics. His real point is that there are hundreds of "Americas" now for marketers and politicians to contend with, comprised of untold niches of people loosely or tightly joined together by common interests and beliefs, and we ignore them at our peril.
Shivonne Byrne, Innuity CMO
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Posted by: custom essay | October 21, 2011 at 01:24 PM