Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Faith Popcorn

"GENTREND: How Trends are Shaping the Youth of Today and Defining the Culture of Tomorrow."

MS. GIBBS: Well, thank you all, stalwarts. You get a special prize for staying through, and you're going to get that prize in just a minute with the presentation of Faith Popcorn.

I have been asked to remind you that her book is out there, and a number of you have already purchased the book. Right after this, Faith will go out and sign those books for you. There are a few more out there, if you would like one, after you hear this. It's EVEolution, which she's going to talk about at the end of this presentation.

Also, if you want to share a cab to the airport, there's a list out there that you can sign up for.

Please turn in your evaluations with any suggestions that you may have for the future of the program.

Faith Popcorn is a name that I certainly remembered from years past, and she is a parent of a kindergarten student at Hewitt. Aren't we lucky to have her there. g.g. is her daughter. Faith will probably talk about her a little bit in this presentation.

Faith is a best-selling author of Dictionary of the Future, EVEolution, which you have today, Clicking, and The Popcorn Report. She's the founder of Brain Reserve, a futurist marketing consulting firm that she established in 1974. Brain Reserve is a firm that guides companies in understanding and anticipating consumer behavior and leveraging established brands, new products, and services to meet the needs of future customers.

Recognized as America's foremost trend expert, Faith Popcorn has identified such sweeping societal concepts as cocooning, cashing out, anchoring, and pleasure revenge. I'm looking forward to finding out about those.

As key strategist for Brain Reserve, Faith applies her insight regarding cultural and business trends to help Brain Reserve clients reposition established brands or companies develop new products and define areas of new business opportunity. She's documented as having a 95 percent accuracy rate in her predictions. She correctly predicted demand for fresh foods -- those of you in New York know we have a new thing there called Fresh Direct, which I couldn't live without, which brings all your groceries to your door. You order it from the computer -- it's wonderful. And four-wheel-drive, all you SUV-ers, as well as the spiritual tenor of the millennium, the anchoring trend.

She was the first to anticipate the explosive growth in home delivery, home businesses, and home shopping. The armored cocoon, that's called.

Her seminar today will focus on how future trends are affecting consumer life styles, particularly in schools, and how this affects our young men and women, the things that we roll our eyes about from time to time as we see our young people involved in them.

Heralded for her extraordinary ability to forecast emerging consumer patterns, Faith is frequently interviewed, and just did an interview on the phone with USA Today, also The New York Times, Time, Fortune, and Today Show, Face the Nation, and CNN. So you have likely seen her.

She's a graduate of NYU and New York High School of the Performing Arts.

Faith, you should have been here last night. You could have performed with the group here. We had quite a show. You could have added to it.

I want to end with a little story that I hope is not apocryphal. I haven't asked this of Faith.

We had an event. Faith was there, and it was in the home of a parent. Her little boy, who was four years old, was there. I didn't hear this, but it was repeated to me. Someone introduced Faith to this little boy, and said, "This is Ms. Popcorn."

And of course, people always go, "Popcorn. How did you get a name like Popcorn?"

Well, apparently he looked at her and he said something like, "Is your name really Popcorn?"

And she said, "Yes. And you know what my middle name is?"

And he said, "No."

And she said, "Butter."

Welcome, Faith Popcorn, to NAPSG. (Applause.)

MS. POPCORN: Hi. Hi. (Shouting.) Too many martinis; right? You let them drink, don't you?

Drinking is very important, but I'll get back to that later. You know, I think I'll start in a place which sort of explains just a little bit what I'm hoping to leave here with you and my mission. My mission is to lift myself and others into the best future. That's my personal mission, and that's my company's mission.

And the way we do that, or the way I'm going to try to do it today, I think I'm going to be able to leave you with an ability to predict the future. This is very good for your stock picks. Excellent. It's like going outside your front door in the morning and looking at the dateline and seeing that it says, instead of 2004, 2014. It could be very useful because you go right to the stock page, and see where you should be making the investments today. What are the tracks today? What tracks do you jump on?

So that's actually what we do for the Fortune 500. We move them just a little bit, you know, just like the Titanic. You want to miss that iceberg by eight degrees, only eight degrees. It's usually just a subtle shift that puts you on the path, the right path, to the future.

A lot of companies, a lot of people, are working in a way where they're kind of looking through their rear-view mirror and trying to navigate the future by looking backward.

And another mistake people make about the future -- and I'm going to take questions, by the way, so write some questions down, and I'll answer any questions that I'm able to answer, that you ask. So that's good conversation. It's very good for me because it lets me think with you and understand what's on your mind, and that's how I get my database.

We're talking to about 8,000 people in a year, actually one-on-one interviews. So we're really picking it up from the culture, all kinds of different cultures. We're reading 500 publications a month in about ten languages, picking up the culture we have. The best thing we have -- and I'll invite you to join at the end -- is something called Faith Popcorn's Brain Reserve Talent Bank. That's probably close to 8,000 members right now, globally.

The way we do it, we ask people to sign on and then if we're having a brainstorm we do it on line or have you come in, or if you have a question to ask, or you need a masseuse globally, we can find that for you. It's a nice little club, and a lot of times people wear our satellite pin. We've had it every year practically since the company started, and it just says you're part of our constellation and an honored member in our constellation. That's what our talent bank is about.

A lot of times, you know, it's hard to understand a culture, so hard to be in a culture and understand the culture you're in. It's very difficult. But a lot of things are about how to preserve your position and what you call things and I'll tell you the story which might be on your mind about my name.

People say, What's wrong with the name Faith? It's a Quaker name. So I kind of kid around about that. They don't mean the Faith part. The Popcorn part has a good story to it. You know, women, I'll be talking to you at the end about women, EVEolution about women, it's about women, men under 40, Hispanics and blacks. We're kind of a club. An out club.

I talk a lot about women because women buy 95 percent of the products even though the Fortune 500 only represents about 3 percent on the boards. But anyway, that's another story.

I talk a lot about women because women have a different language. And if you know a lot of women, you know that we talk in layers. It's like what we mean, and then under that layer is what we really, really mean, and under that layer is something else, and under that layer is the truth.

So all of our trends and predictions in a female-run company come with stories. So the story of my name is this. And what you call things and why it's important is that when I started my company in 1974, first of all, I had one of the few W-2s that said zero. That was interesting. And I had it for about ten years. Because the thing about being a futurist is that you have your ideas too early and nobody pays you for those. It's still true. Nobody ever believes anything when you say about the future. It's amazing. We have a 95 percent documented accuracy rate, and yet I'll tell you stuff today that -- I mean, maybe you're different because maybe you're more open. But most people go, "That's not going to happen," and it happens almost every single time.

So there I was, starting my company, the first few years of my company. And Fortune Magazine called me. They had heard about me. I was really excited. I had no clients, so I wrote down a lot of notes about what I would recommend to clients if I had any. And actually that's how I got into the future thing. Having no clients, I only had predictions, predictions and recommendations. So we would write reports for people that didn't exist, that didn't pay us anything.

So anyway, I had things to tell them. So these guys came up from Fortune Magazine and they said, "You know, we have one big question for you."

"What is it?"

And they said, "Well, how did you get your name?"

And I said, "That's why you're here?"

And they said, "Essentially. Why else would we be here?"

So I said, "Well, you know" -- I don't know what I was smoking or drinking that morning. Don't tell g.g. this. Could have been anything in the 1970s. So I said, "You know, my great-great grandfather lived in Italy, near Lee Iacoca's family." I said, "Our family name was Cornier, back then."

So I'm waiting for the laugh because I'm 100 percent Jewish. He didn't do his research. Always do your research. We always do our research. So I said, "Write this down. The family name, Cornier, Italy." I said, "In the old country, in the village where he grew up, he was so old they used to call him Poppa."

So they said, "Yeah."

And I said, "When he was coming through Immigration, the immigration guy said, 'What's your name?'

"And he said, 'My name is Poppa Cornier.'

"I shortened that to Popcorn, and that's how I got it." In Fortune Magazine.

So that's when I learned not to believe anything I read. So there it was.

But the interesting part about the story is, one, do your homework. Do your research. We do a lot of research. We do all our homework all the time. And having been a C-, D+ student -- don't tell g.g. -- D+ I thought was pretty good because it wasn't an F.

So I learned over time the homework part is really, really important. And also it's about what you call things, how you position things. So would you have believed in a future trend from Faith Popcorn or Faith Plotkin? I thought Popcorn was better, and the way I really got that name is, it was my nickname. Somebody that I knew early on -- he was Italian. His name was Gino Constantino Goledna. He could not get Plotkin out of his mouth, so he said, "This is Faith, I don't know, Popcorn, I guess, whatever her name is," and I changed it.

So essentially, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes it's how you position something that makes it viable, because positioning is simply a way you want other people to look at something. The thing doesn't change, you know? I mean, it's still the same, but it's shifted just a little bit.

So let me get into this, and as I'm going along, either write stuff down, ask questions, let's talk.

We've written four books in the company. The Popcorn Report, Clicking, EVEolution, The Dictionary of the Future. We're working on Popcorn Report 2, now, a much tougher book because it's about the next ten years.

Let me tell you, The Popcorn Report we wrote about in 1990 was a lot simpler than what we're seeing ahead. A lot of this is about how we predict the waters ahead. How are we going to navigate these waters ahead?

A beautiful thing about understanding the future is that past think is about being stuck in the status quo. Thinking one fiscal quarter. You know, if you can think of a quarter, people may do a five-year plan but they're thinking about five days, can they survive five days?

And our work takes people from past think to future think, anticipating change, thinking a quarter of a century ahead, not just a quarter.

And the trends really let you get there. And the trends are simply ways of organizing our vision of the future. I'm going to take you through some of those in a while.

Fads are fast. People get trends and fads very confused. Fads are fast. Trends are tenacious. They're big, chunky things that stay in place at least a decade. We predicted cocooning in 1981, named it and framed it, said people would start to stay at home, and it's still growing in 2004. When you get one like that, you can actually make some decisions based on what you know is going to be happening in the future.

So we uncover the trends often by seeing the fad, digging deeper, connecting the dots, seeing what the overpicture is. So I talk about the fantasy adventure trends, you know, people looking for safe adventure, the fantasy of adventure, not real adventure. They're not even going out and climbing the real mountain. They're going like wall-climbing in the gym. That's about fantasy adventure. They're not doing anything to get them off the couch, but they're going to virtual reality machines and having these incredible pseudo-sexual -- I think all this adventure is kind of sexual -- experiences with no risk and actually total privacy.

So that would be the fantasy adventure trend being demonstrated by people with pink hair, people who like, you know, virtual reality. So those are the fads that indicate the big trend.

You have to understand the big moves because then you can understand all the little fads that you're seeing around you, and fads get you confused and make you think something. So I want to show you some fads and then show you the trends they relate to.

You probably know this guy. American Idol. That's the fad. Looking deeper, "Pop democracy trumps real politics." So amongst 15-to-26-year-olds, for example, 64 percent can identify the winner of American Idol. 64 percent. Ruben Studdard. They know him. They know this guy. I could have told you he was going to win. Why did Ruben Studdard win? Why did he win? Because he was fat. This is why he won. Because people are looking. They call him the Velvet Teddy Bear. We're going to talk about obesity later. There's tremendous comfort in that and the identification of that. So I knew Ruben Studdard was going to win. I could have won a lot of money on that.

Forty percent can name which party controls Congress. Ten percent can identify the speaker of the US House. So look at this, this pop democracy. Looking deeper, pop democracy is about American Idol. We can vote. We can vote all day long while we're supposed to be in our classes, we're actually on our little computers, voting all day long. That's what kids are doing, in case you're wondering. That's what they're doing.

So the trend is, the idoling of America. Todd TV. Americana. Married by America. Picking your spouse on television. The American Idol. That's the trend. The fad: Paris Hilton.

Now, Paris Hilton may go away, you'll be happy to know. But somebody worse will come in her place. So be happy with Paris Hilton right now. And looking deeper, the intersection of porn and pop culture. Hilton's "Simple Life" energized by her porn video on the web. So on TV you might see that program, "Simple Life." Okay. That's okay. You know, rich girl hits the farm. That's kind of interesting. But running in simultaneous time the kids are watching her porn video on the web.

So they're not like us. Kids are not like us, by the way, in case you haven't noticed. They're not saying, "That's TV." This is interesting. "That's the computer." You know, "That's the web. That's the instant message." No. "That's my teacher trying to get my attention."

To them it's a mush of communication, stuff going in, and more and more stuff is going in and they don't separate it out, and that's why they don't know. They shouldn't be looking at the web at this hour, but they should be doing this. It's not like that. It's the screen. They look at it as the screen.

Trend. Porn is the norm. Don't forget, don't shoot the messenger. I'm just reporting this stuff. When you see Janet and Justin at the Super Bowl, you see that, and let me say what was interesting to me about this thing, how she took hers down. We've seen so much worse. What I ask is why do people stop there? Why make a big deal about that? There's so many other things going on.

But they decided they'd pick out that thing, that thing. And that's the kind of things we study. I don't know if you know "The Surreal Life." Anybody know this? "Surreal Life" is another one of those shows, but the star of "Surreal Life," which is a national television show, is a porn star, Ron Jeremy, going prime time. So you see the blending and the skipping between these?

And I bet there's more than one of you sitting in your seats saying, "We have to stop this."

Forget that. Forget this. You have to understand this, because the train has left the station. Not only has it left the station, but the train turned into a rocket ship and has left the planet. This is over. This is here. This is happening. The only thing left for us is to understand it and be able to resteer, reposition or whatever we have to do. But we must understand.

And people spend a lot of time railing against actually the present, but we really should be thinking about how to indicate the future, the fad. Buddha T-shirts. I don't know if you know this, but there's an Internet site, Billy Buddha, and it's tees, "Follow your bliss."

Then you see celebrities studying the Kabbalah. Madonna is, and Demi Moore is studying the Kabbalah, while she's having an affair with somebody, you know, hundreds of years younger than she is.

Looking deeply. Spirituality goes mass. The whole ohm thing. Yoga up 25 percent. Forty-three percent of teens go to church or synagogue every week. Seventy-seven percent of college kids pray.

So we're looking deeper, and we've stated that's a trend called anchoring. The trend is called anchoring. The indicators are Kabbalah and the home. Even Oil of Olay comes out with a product line called "Ohm."

This is not an accident. I'm trying in the little time we have together to connect these dots for you to show you these tracks.

So Buddhism is the fastest-growing religion in most western countries, which is really interesting. And Mel Gibson's "The Passion," makes the cover of Newsweek, and this is just all about anchoring. So all of this, the Buddha t-shirts, all of this, the little red bracelets, the string bracelets you're seeing on people -- that's all about it. It's the anchoring trend, reaching back to our spiritual roots, taking what was once secure in the past in order to be ready for the future.

Our culture and your students. Kids are searching for a foundation amid the frivolity and highly sexualized, highly sexualized, nature of their world. So when you look at the future and you start to understand the trends, instead of railing against Janet Jackson, try to understand that anchoring, you know, going to overlay this trend toward porn is the norm. Those are the things that we have to start to think about.

So when you're future thinking about your students, with the trends you can understand the depth and texture of the culture shaping your students. It's very, very cool when you start to really understand them and they understand that you understand them. It takes some of the fun out of that for them.

Connecting powerfully with parents influences the culture. Anticipating what your future alums, parents, and donors will be like in the decade ahead. How much time will we spend on the donor of the future? And the donor of the future is the student that's making a lot of trouble in your class right now. So trying to understand the future tracks that.

So how do we get from here to there? It's called brailling the culture. Brailling the culture is something that we've gotten kind of famous for and it's truly almost closing your eyes and feeling, like feeling, like we're blind people in the culture, feeling the culture, brailling the culture. By looking and smelling, intuiting, touching, tasting, brailling this culture.

Our world is changing, and to understand the trends, we must first understand how profoundly and rapidly our society is changing beneath our feet.

There is a cultural revolution going on as we speak. This family, the Cleaver family, does not exist. This family that P&G, Proctor and Gamble, taught people, are still marketing to and showing soccer moms, are simply 23 percent of families. Yet we call 76 percent alternative. There's something screwy about that. This is dead, dying. And we may be railing against it, but it's over.

USA Today yesterday had this great little chart showing that in 1968 it was 9 percent, now this year it's 28 percent of families are run by a single parent who's a female. 28 percent.

So we think we're making room for that alternative family when actually -- and look at Hispanics, if you want to feel that, if you really want to feel that -- when actually they're making room for you. That's what dinosaurs do before they fall over. You know, they rail and complain a lot.

So the cultural revolution is Hispanic, it's single, it's nuclear, it's older, it's Asian, it's younger. America, white, married, 2.2 kids? Come on. It does not exist hardly. As a matter of fact, the ones that are in it -- talk to kids in that kind of family. They're dying to get out. I mean, they pretend they're from some kind of weirdo family. It's not cool to be white anymore. It's embarrassing. You want to be something else. 75 percent of American family households are nontraditional. 2.4 million grandparents raising 4.5 million grandkids. Six to ten million gay parents, and that's probably an understatement. 1.6 million kids under 18 are adopted.

"Don't call me Granny. Don't call me Granny." When you look at me, I have a daughter who's five and a half years old. So is it a stereotype? When my godchild actually wants to get me aggravated, this is what she says to me. She's eight.

So when you're looking at people actually, you have to look at them kind of in a reformatted way. 506,000 kids born to women 35 to 39. 125,000 born to women 40 to 44. 14.8 million single women with families. So just think about it. Think about that Ozzie and Harriet family. Think about how long ago actually that family kind of died.

White bread has gone multigrain, people. Seven million Americans identify as two or more races, because that's cool. If you can even be more than two, it's better. Thirty percent of teens identify with a race other than white. Fifty million speak a language other than English at home.

And Chinese! My daughter does speak fluent Mandarin, and this upset a lot of people, you know. That was kind of interesting, because I, too, was raised in China, but my daughter, of course, came from there, as well. And I lost my Chinese, so I was determined that she wouldn't. I got her at ten months old, and of course, she's prelingual in Chinese, and I immediately got a Chinese nanny and kept this Mandarin going. It was easy.

And yet in all the schools they say, "Maybe this is interrupting her learning, her education." It was so disturbing to so many educators and noneducators that this kid spoke the language of her little face, you know.

So I think that there's a lot of subtle racism out there. I see that as a form of racism. In Europe, nobody says kids shouldn't speak five languages before they're seven, that that is unhealthy for their education. It's sort of bizarre.

So we're looking at this kind of thing to understand. Like in California, people are starting to really feel squeezed out because they're Hispanic, instead of realizing that they should be learning Spanish. You know?

I'm not going to tell you the client, but we had this multi-billion-billion-billion-billion client. We said, you know, it's -- what is it called -- like black, whatever, month, whatever it is now. So we said, "How much of the force here is black?"

"In central headquarters, 3 percent."

I say, "I'm not only talking about here at central headquarters, Arkansas. I'm talking about like how much of the work force is black?"

"Twenty-five percent."

I said, "Shouldn't we do anything about like celebrating this a little bit?"

They said, "Faith, if we do this" -- this is fascinating. This is in 2004. "If we do this for the blacks, what are we going to do for the Hispanics?"

I said, "Okay." So I said to my people quietly, "Let's go home, back to New York, where they understand us."

I mean, this is amazing. It's out there. SKIPP: School kids with income and purchasing power. These kids are rich. Show me the money. 70 million Americans under age of 18, 25 percent of the population.

Show me the money. $172 billion in spending power.

Show me the money. $485 billion annually. No wonder we're working on programming and stuff to capture these kids.

Don't generalize about specific groups. Our culture is shifting and the trends really give you the perspective to understand that culture.

This is our trend bank and I picked out a couple that I thought would be most interesting to you. 99 lives, anchoring, being alive, egonomics, customization, which is to say in the future, starting out already, we're going to have it our way. We're going to have -- this could be good -- our jeans our way, our underwear our way, our bathing suits our way. Customized product. That's coming very, very soon.

And then EVEolution and Future TENSE. We're terrified about what's going to happen to us. So just to start with Future TENSE, we have an anxiety-ridden culture, simultaneous social, economic, political and ethical chaos, and finding ourselves beyond our ability to cope with it. We are so incredibly freaked out. Future TENSE.

The search for the tower bomber. First indicator, 1993. 1999, Columbine. Terrorism hits home, as you just heard with our last speaker. America goes to war. Predators killing kids.

Fear, big fear, is driving our purchasing behavior. Big fear. There's big fear out there. It's so big that people can't talk about it. It is so big. So you wonder why we're jumping to reality shows, something we can control. Okay, eat worms. Okay. That seems, like, safer. It seems, like, nicer. Eating worms suddenly becomes something we can concentrate on.

Future TENSE manifestations. 20 million gated communities housing 8 million Americans, and they're not necessarily upscale. Middle-class communities getting gated. Americans drank 6 billion gallons of bottled water last year, $8 billion worth. We don't trust the water source. You look at cultures and you don't trust your water source. We don't trust our food source. Where was it grown? Who fed it? Who petted it? What did it look like? What was it injected with? All of a sudden we're aware. You wonder why you're going to see vegetarianism in the future big time. You're seeing it growing. You notice how it's becoming a little trendy, but you're going to see it big time in the future, because we don't want to think now, the animals are becoming much more alive to us. They're becoming much more three-dimensional because of this Future TENSE thing, because of mad cow and other things.

Cookbooks. Look at the indicators in cookbooks. I could tell you so many things where you can see these trends. They're everywhere. In cookbooks, it says, "If you don't want to use a real egg, here's an egg substitute." Now, that is weird.

Look for the weird. The weird produces the trends of the future. That's weird. That says we're a culture scared of eggs, salmonella. That was the first thing. To get off those wooden cooking boards onto plastic. Uh-oh, get off those plastic cooking boards. You've read about this. The plastic boards -- those are bad. Maybe use no boards. Cut it on your hands. Just go eat a lot of flowers.

3.4 million securities systems installed last year. 22 percent of homes have one.

Cheaperthandirt.com reported a 500 percent increase in gas mask sales.

The no-contact jacket, where if you touch their jacket, you get electrocuted. 80,000 volts of electricity at the click of a switch. This is not the future, people. It's the present. It costs $950. It's out there.

Protection on the road, the modern urban assault vehicle. And people are getting that just to be chic. Look at the Hummer. Like you need a Humvee? Are you serious? You know what they say about sports cars and what they meant to men? Now it's the Humvee. That's a little worrisome. I have to think about that.

Ballistic protection. Lincoln Mercedes, $140,000 and soon cars that will shield weapons of mass destruction.

How will accountability shift to schools? More than metal detectors. Radio-frequency ID cards in the backpacks of students. They're working on that. School-issued GPS ankle bracelets. For those of us that grew up thinking school is like prison, this could further reinforce that, that we can, speaking for myself, watch our kids, you know, and where they're wandering to.

School-based Amber alerts. Actually, kids leave campus, parents get school text-messaging so if your kid leaves the campus, you get a message saying your kid is currently in a bar on the corner. Could be good.

99 lives. If you notice, if you go up to a counter, people are yelling at you, "What do you want? What do you want?" It's 99 lives. Things are speeding along so fast.

The movie clips -- have you noticed this -- are becoming faster, because directors know that your brain synapses are snapping along, and if people slow it down and talk to you very slowly, you will want to kill them.

So it's going like that. We're too busy to cook. The average square foot of prepared food sections in new supermarkets is up 168 percent, $1.6 billion in supermarket sales of hot entrees in 2002, up 40 percent. So people want instantaneous home cooking, not in your home, but somebody's home that goes to your home.

We're all too busy to share a meal as a family. Family dinners are down 33 percent in the past ten years. One-third blame kids' schedules, but truly I think it's the food provider, Mom -- still Mom, by the way -- the food provider who's too exhausted to really cook.

We're too busy to keep track of our relationships. There's a new thing from British Telecom called Personal Bouquet, tracks phone calls and e-mails. So this represents the important people in your family, and that little droopy one is your mamma that you forgot to call. This thing monitors your relationships.

We're too busy to sleep. You're laughing now, but when you think about it, you'll be crying. We're too busy to sleep. 100 million Americans are severely sleep-deprived. 26 percent of teens are sleeping less than six hours on school nights, and 50 percent of teens say lack of sleep contributes to stress. And that's true. Tremendous sleep deprivation among kids and adults.

Students are suffering from this time famine. They're going to need stress managers, time management coaches, meditation rooms, nap rooms. This is really filtering down on children. Students are suffering while parents hold you responsible for missed family dinners, as educators, if their kids are feeling too stressed out. Will schools be called upon to help bring the 99 lives down to 89 lives?

Being alive. This is where we used to get into the health and fitness trend. And I'll tell you what's happened to the health and fitness trend, in case you're interested. Remember when all those exercise bicycles were sold? All those exercise bicycles became clothing valets, where you just hang your stuff there.

So this is about the awareness that good health extends longevity. We don't give a damn about fitness. We just care about living a little bit longer, and if that involves a little fitness, that's okay. You know, it's enough to join the gym, you notice, if you compare the membership to the attendance, because it's enough to join the gym. You don't have to go there. So we see that global obesity -- now, that's a big problem, we say. Worldwide, 750 million overweight, 300 million obese. In America, 64 percent are overweight, 31 percent obese. 300,000 deaths a year. Obesity is surpassing tobacco.

We say that the fast food makers, McDonald's and others, are on Tobacco Road. There will be legislation against this, but it's not going to really help much. This is another train that has left the station. Kids eating a dinner of chicken strips -- I saw this last night -- are eating enough fat for four days. So we have to change thinking here. We're not going to get McDonald's or Burger King or any of them to sell better food if they're making money on the food they're selling.

This is capitalism, people. We need to retrain their mentality and spirituality and reposition what those kinds of foods mean, so people don't want to eat them anymore.

Tobacco is a good example, because through education and entertainment, we actually repositioned tobacco so people wouldn't want it as much.

Weight of kids doubled since 1980. Overweight teens tripled since 1980, and if a girl doesn't exercise by the time she's 12, she never will. So it really starts young.

Food for thought. Amongst kids only Santa is more recognized than Ronald McDonald. He's our icon of fun.

Food for thought. We consume 6.5 billion pounds of snacks every year. One in three school kids eats a fast-food meal every single day. Half of kids snack after school, another 15 percent after dinner. And Zone kids, Zone Chefs, deliver to New York homes -- this is very New York, actually. Kids bring lunch to school, $900 a month, so that Zone diet is actually providing food. So when we see something upscale like that, we watch for it to filter down. You'll see that interpretation later down at the Wal-Mart arena. So that's something to look for.

How else will schools figure into the fight for wellness? Optional weight loss clinics instead of gym classes. Atkins-approved cafeteria food. Nutritional counselors posted at food lines. Classrooms built so natural sunlight showers students. The fight for wellness. The fight for life. The fight for better eating, the fight for longer living.

Vending machines branded by diet plan. The Atkins branding machine. Cafeteria debit cards stop kids from purchasing junk. Today's students are anxiety-ridden, time-starved, they're overfed, they're overwhelmed, they're bombarded by brand messages.

And the parents, too, are overwhelmed by the future, panicked about the kids, expecting you to shoulder some of the responsibility and accountability.

The administrators -- look at the situation -- competing against savvy marketers for student mind share, striving to gain the trust and the approval of moms, too.

Look. I'm going to go back. I want to show you this. Look at these three groups. Students: Not good. Parents: Not good. Administrators? So how should this thing come out in the end? You have got three stressed groups. This is tough. These answers don't come easy.

Solution. Now, the thing that I have noticed is that education is not viewed as a brand. If this was a brand, with three unhappy constituencies, you can be sure that a chairman of that brand would start to reposition it and start to build in value and equity and run it like a brand. Become the brand manager of your school. Market to students and parents with savvy, understanding the future they're facing and the lives they're living and not generalizing them.

Think like a strategic marketer. How can your educational brand connect authentically with the lives of students and moms? How do you create relationships?

And that's what EVEolution is all about. EVEolution is simply about creating a relationship with your constituency. How do you create that relationship? Because relationships are key to the EVEolutionary model, because when we're talking about women, women do not just buy brands. They join brands. They join up with that brand, see the brand as part of themselves.

So EVEolution comes in eight truths, and I want to give you a little example of how it might apply here. Truth one: Connecting your moms to each other will connect them to the brand. If you want to see a person that's connecting the audience to each other, look at Oprah. Brilliant brand manager. Her reading club. What's that about? It's about connecting people to each other, which connects them to Oprah.

So we're suggesting connecting the moms to each other connects them to the brand, bringing moms together. Facilitate connectivity and interactivity. Become a relationship conduit, and she will reward you for it.

Truth seven. Co-parenting. That means co-parenting the brand. It means raising the brand. Women join a brand that they help create. So it's like letting them play in the brand. Listen to the moms at the schools. Incorporate the ideas. Invest their vision, as they do in yours.

Co-parent the brands with the students' input as well. Enlist them as junior brand managers. And collaboration really breeds dedication. It breeds inspiration. It breeds the next generation of donors. This generation of students and parents will lead you to the next. So in today's classrooms are sitting tomorrow's donors. And when you see some of the big donors -- you know, when you talk later about legacy, you'll hear them say they got that idea very early in their educational experience and they became brand-loyal because of something that happened very early.

So forge a lasting bond with the students. They'll support your mission later, trust you with the next generation of students, and own the future, by starting today, about understanding what's coming down.

You do not get to affect that much what's coming. It's coming. Trends. We do not correct trends or change trends or reshape trends. We simply jump on the trend train if we're smart, because the trends go. They go. We don't invent trends, influence trends. So by understanding the trends, you can actually own your future.

So that's what I hope I have brought to you today, a little bit about understanding what's coming down, and also invite you, of course, to join our talent bank, and I'll also take any questions that you have. I thank you for being such a beautiful, open audience. You're incredible. Thank you.

They said you wouldn't be shy. Questions? Answers?

MS. NORRIS: Where is this business of porn in the pop culture? Where is that going?

MS. POPCORN: Where is porn in the pop culture going? Well, like what?

MS. NORRIS: We can't stop it, parents are worried about it, we're worried about it.

MS. POPCORN: I think things become less pornographic when they -- porn is about being hidden, right? About finding something that's hidden. And I think the less things are hidden, the more open they are. You know, I'm wondering what would have happened when Janet Jackson pulled her thing off, if everybody just laughed? If they said "Uh. It's silly."

So I'm saying that I don't think you can fight porn. I think you can bring good ideas and less attention, and it becomes less pornographic.

What does pornographic mean? It means something that shouldn't be shown, I guess, something that's hidden. So I think a lot of it is just that you don't get to rail against porn. Go to 42nd Street. Every town has streets full of it. On the Internet. My God. You do not get to shut it out. So you have got to get kids to look at it in a different way. And in a way, you know, I guess the religious right is trying one way, to make it so awful, so horrible, and make people back away.

But I actually think with kids, that makes kids go hunt for it. So the way I handle it is, you know, laugh. But it's here and it's going to become more and more available. So if you're not teaching the kids how to handle it, if you're telling kids to block it out or not look at it or not teaching them how to handle it -- why would a kid not go take marijuana or heroin if it was offered? Because you taught them something, how to handle it, hopefully. Like if they run into it -- because you can't watch them, even though God knows I try, 24 hours a day, you know, monitor them. They're going to see it. Go, "Huh."

That's the best I can do. I'm not a porn expert. But boy, people that think it's going to get stopped, or all that, are kidding themselves.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: How is the baby boom generation going to affect the fads and trends of the future? I keep reading that the age group, which is generously represented here in this room, is the largest population group in our society. But nothing was said about that.

MS. POPCORN: Yeah. That's right. This was more of a trend thing about the next generation. Baby boomers. Big, tremendously nostalgic generation. You're seeing that the music of how we grew up -- it's interesting, because kids love that music even though they weren't there. It's becoming iconic. We love the Beatles, we love Simon and Garfunkel. We love Cher. We're keeping her alive, my God.

So I think there's a lot of compassion in that generation. And interestingly, that generation, of course, is going to live very, very long.

Something even more interesting about that generation -- and we're working with some doctors now that are developing some very, very interesting new medicine that will modify cancer, modify Alzheimer's. But with all those modifications, genetic engineering and et cetera -- and that's another thing I didn't really talk about.

If you said to me, "Faith, what's scaring you the most about the future?" It wouldn't be porn. It would be genetic engineering and what that's going to mean. And I'll give you this example. If you say to a mom who's pregnant, "Your little daughter is going to be born with cancer. Do you want us to get rid of it? We can just go click."

"Of course."

You say, "Okay, your little daughter is going to be born with one leg shorter than the other and it is going to always give her a hip problem in the future. Want us to fix it?"

Click. Okay. "Fat legs run in your family, and that's really ugly. We can fix that. Shall we fix that?"

Okay. Click. You know what? "Would you like a blond, rather than a dark-haired kid?"

Now I'm going toward the Aryan Nation. Blue eyes, brown eyes? Short little nose? You want the acne gene removed? You want what? What's the IQ you think would be a good IQ? How do you start to legislate and say, "This thing about fixing our body parts, okay. But stem cell research, well, it depends for what."

And I love how we think we're legislating genetic engineering here in the US, because there is no other place in the world where they're going to develop a human being clone, right? We say in the US it's a no-no. All we do is fall behind science, because in some cold country they have got a little pregnant son growing in a jar right now. It exists.

So when I look at baby boomers, life extension, life extendability, this genetic engineering thing will be the nightmare of the future, and nobody's thinking about it. Nobody's thinking. They're legislating it so they are making noise for votes about it, but nobody is really thinking about what it means. That's scary.

Who else?

MS. MARTER: Is EVEolution just about women as consumers? Earlier you said men under 40. Can you talk a little bit more about the audience?

MS. POPCORN: EVEolution -- forgive me if you're in the room -- is not about 50-plus guys, so it's easier to say what it's not than what it is. There's a model about how you sell people something through a relationship, and the people that are more prone to buy through relationships are, first, females, and then Hispanics, males or females; blacks, males or females; kids, young people. Relational selling.

So it's about creating these rules or truths in EVEolution to create a relationship with your market. So then you're not just selling a brand. You are marrying the brand with the consumer. Brand consumers meet and match and marry.

MR. HALPERT: Why are we the most fundamentalist nation in the world, and what does that portend for the future?

MS. POPCORN: Well, tell me what you think is fundamentalist.

MR. HALPERT: Believing that religious text is literal and will govern. It's the dominant governing force.

MS. POPCORN: Right. Okay. I think -- and this is just my opinion -- it's about things are so out of control that, like with Atkins, it's like an icon toppling; finding out that all the books were cooked, people were lying, you know. I think that calls on us to try and find some rules.

I think that's what fundamentalism is about, that if we interpret the text exactly right and if we put in stringent rules and if we repress and suppress, that will make everything okay in the future.

And what happens is, you know, it's interesting, this porn thing. I'm really hooked on this porn thing, because it's like having a repression thing going on and porn is popping up. Porn's popping up. It's like the alien. The more you hold it down, the more it pops up. So I think it's a search for control in a very out-of-control moment. And I don't think it's going to stay. I'm hoping it won't.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: In cultures where they have traditionally been more open with, let's take pornography, eating better foods, different kinds of time management, Denmark --

MS. POPCORN: I was thinking of Holland.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: What are the trends there? Are they experiencing the same things, or is it --

MS. POPCORN: No. It's amazing. Denmark, Holland -- I don't have any numbers on it. I could get them, if you give me a card. But from observation, being there, people seem a lot happier. No one makes a big deal about it. Heterosexual men kiss their dads right on the mouth in the street, you know, happy to see them, hug them, kiss them.

It's not all this repression, homophobia. They drink, they smoke. Actually, drug sales are not up. They have streets where they have prostitutes. It's very boring. They have desexualized pornography, actually. So it's interesting. It's not very American, though.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: If you were looking through one of our view books for admissions and saw a phrase that tended to appear frequently, which is, "Preparing students for the future," what would that mean to you?

MS. POPCORN: You mean as a goal? How would I prepare a student for the future?

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: As a parent. If you saw that and your daughter were being prepared for the future, knowing what you know about it, what would that mean to you in terms of preparing a child for the future, when a school says they're going to do it?

MS. POPCORN: I would be pretty sure that they're not going to do it. Good words, bad execution. So I'd be pretty sure. I think a lot of this preparation for the future -- because it's tough when you run a school. I see what Ms. Gibbs is going through. I see it from the other side, because I can barely drop a kid off. It's a lucky day when I can drop a kid off and mothers are going "The food in the cafeteria!"

And I go, who are these people? You know, like get a job. You know? Can you imagine if Ms. Gibbs took it upon herself to prepare kids for the future? She'd have a revolution there. Because one kid's parents go, "That's not what I think the future is." Another kid's parents say, "What is she teaching them?"

You'd barely get through a day. We were talking about that, about running a school. I'll tell you something. I learned this actually from my mentor, a French entrepreneur, who recently died in his 90s. He always told me this. I said, "Pierre, what can I do? I'm so confused. I don't know what to do. This person said this to me," blah, blah.

He says, "Just say" -- he said it with a great French accent -- "you'll think about it."

And I think that was the best piece of advice I ever got. Everything goes away. You just say. You don't even have to think about it. Just say, "I'll think about it."

"Oh."

People feel, like, wonderful of her. Just pass that on. It's good in relationships, too. "I'll think about it."

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Not long ago the notion of branding in private schools would just be anathema, but I do think most of us are thinking more about how we can better position our schools for the future, and branding is a current term. So I think the time is right, but give us some insight on practically how we can apply some marketplace prototypes in branding.

MS. POPCORN: I'll give you a couple of fast ones and if you want to talk more, we can. But I would do a couple of things. Take the eight truths in EVEolution and run the school against it. Are you co-parenting with the parents? Are you passing down the next generation? All the truths. And see where the discontinuities are.

And then I'd do a third. So do truth, discontinuity, correction. And I do the same in the trends, in our work. Are we leveraging the cocooning trend, the fantasy adventure trend, economics trend, the life trend? Trend, situation. You know, are you? Corrections.

And that starts to lead you to what the brand should be. If you believe those are the tracks of the future, you want to reorient the position. And then you can't, by the way -- and this is going to be very difficult for you in your world; this doesn't get done by committee. I know in your world you work by committee. And we see this in the Fortune 500, too.

Nothing gets done by committee. Go back to believing in dictators. Brand dictators. It should be a small group that agree with each other, a really small group that have a lot of power that nobody's going to argue with. You figure out the brand, you test the brand. We never get out of there without getting tremendous feedback. They don't create it, but they tell us, you know, left, right, I don't get it, I don't get it.

So you do some of that, and then you get the brand, and then you sell it. You don't get a brand in a committee. You don't do anything fine, by the way, in a committee. You sell to a committee. That's fine. You sell your vision to a committee. But you don't create a vision in the committee. There's this thing about creating 20 percent of the vision. Everybody got their piece. That's terrible. Anyway, that's just a sideline.

Who else?

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: The one trend that you mention that had tremendous appeal to me was the anchoring trend, and I'm wondering if, as a school head, you can kind of pick your trend and do a really lovely job with your trend, and then sort of put the porn trend over there.

MS. POPCORN: You can like pour your anchoring trend over the porn trend. Porn is not a trend. It's an indicator, actually, of how people are railing against either fundamentalism or oppression, or because they're looking for feeling, they can't feel anything anymore, people can't feel anything, so porn heightens that. They can feel something.

That's about also why piercing, why tattooing, why cutting. It's about feeling. Effective feeling. Anchoring is a big one, though. Anchoring is a good trend. You could sell that trend in your school.

Anyway, thank you very, very much.

MS. GIBBS: Thank you everyone, and thank you so much, Faith. Aren't I lucky to have her, too? I think I may be able to put her on the board. She likes dictators. And I think that $950 jacket, you know -- if any faculty member comes near you, bam.

Thank you, Faith. We're grateful to you for this.

Please turn in evaluations. Any other announcements?

MS. BRIZINDINE: Thank you.

MS. GIBBS: Go forth in peace. We'll see you next year.