In Microtrends: The Small Forces Changing the World, Mark Penn shows that the most important trends in the world today are the smallest ones. Exploring everything from politics to religion, business, food and entertainment, Penn follows the numbers to uncover what's really popular, not what we think is popular. Because while these trends are shaping the world, they're relatively unseen — they're under-the-radar forces that can involve as little as one percent of the population. (Among them are: the growing number of office romances; the triumph of individual sports over team sports; the influence of Protestant Latinos; extreme commuters; Philo-Semites; and older fathers who are spending more and more money on their children.)
People have never been more sophisticated, more individualistic, or more knowledgeable about the choices they make in their daily lives. Yet it takes intensive, scientific study to find the logical patterns that underlie those choices. Mark J. Penn, the man who identified “Soccer Moms” as a crucial constituency in President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, is known for his ability to detect relatively small patterns of behavior in our culture that are wielding large influence on business, politics, and our personal lives.
While helping you to refine your own trend-spotting skills, Penn pierces remarkably stubborn conventional thinking to find the counterintuitive trends that represent a portrait of society in the twenty-first century. A groundbreaking book about the way people think and how they act, Microtrends explores the practical implications of these trends for politics, business and society itself and shows readers how to identify the microtrends that can transform a business enterprise or spark a movement.
In *Microtrends: The Small Forces Changing the World*, Mark Penn shows that the most important trends in the world today are the smallest ones. Exploring everything from politics to religion, business, food and entertainment, Penn follows the numbers to uncover what's really popular, not what we think is popular. Because while these trends are shaping the world, they're relatively unseen — they're under-the-radar forces that can involve as little as one percent of the population. (Among them are: the growing number of office romances; the triumph of individual sports over team sports; the influence of Protestant Latinos; extreme commuters; Philo-Semites; and older fathers who are spending more and more money on their children.)
People have never been more sophisticated, more individualistic, or more knowledgeable about the choices they make in their daily lives. Yet it takes intensive, scientific study to find the logical patterns that underlie those choices. Mark J. Penn, the man who identified “Soccer Moms” as a crucial constituency in President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, is known for his ability to detect relatively small patterns of behavior in our culture that are wielding large influence on business, politics, and our personal lives.
While helping you to refine your own trend-spotting skills, Penn pierces remarkably stubborn conventional thinking to find the counterintuitive trends that represent a portrait of society in the twenty-first century. A groundbreaking book about the way people think and how they act, *Microtrends* explores the practical implications of these trends for politics, business and society itself and shows readers how to identify the microtrends that can transform a business enterprise or spark a movement.