What Is a Trend?

A Trend describes a deep social and cultural movement forward for at least a decade out.

It cuts across multiple realms of the consumer’s life and a wide swath of societies and marketplaces. It expresses primal human needs and aspirations and predicts what their needs will be. What it’s not is almost as important as what it is:  It’s not a fleeting a short lived phase or passion. In other words, it’s not a fad.

Faith Popcorn’s TrendBank is the repository of BrainReserve’s insights and data on cultural shifts. It continuously monitors the 17 BrainReserve Trends by her core team of Trend Analysts and Strategists, a global network of Trendspotters, and tech-assisted intel in the form of heatmaps, cultural listening, and other proprietary tools. Each of the 17 Trends reflects a different and unobvious dimension of consumer behavior and desire. Sometimes these lenses are contradictory and conflicting, just as our impulses are, but together, they describe the full and global spectrum of human experience through the lens of the Future.

For instance, Cocooning expresses the craving for safety in an increasingly uncertain world. Faith identified, named and framed this Trend in 1981 by spotting a constellation of indicators: she detected a deep shift in the way people were living their lives.

Over were the heady days of staying out all night partying, as seen in the 70s. Restaurants had tables sitting empty on Saturday night. Being worn-out, overstimulated and exhausted became a “thing” – and tech enabled it. Cable TV beamed movies into the home.

Soon, the birth of the Internet allowed us to search for and book reputable in-home services – from massages to prepared meals. A new era was dawning. Faith’s TalentBank of industry visionaries, when probed, reported their circles being burnt out and jittery. When she cross-pollinated this qualitative, creative insight with directional quantitative data, she forecasted a movement that was just coalescing.

Faith worked with her clients to bring movies, food, water and protection in-home by developing products and services with revenues of billions of dollars. For instance, it was she who predicted that people would work at home and partnered with her IBM client to develop the PS1, the first home computer. It was she who worked with an early stage grocery home delivery service, Streamline, to eliminate the supermarket.

The process unfurls further: using BrainReserve’s proprietary methodology, Faith tracks how the 17 Trends pivot. The desire for security and comfort always underpins Cocooning, but it has morphed and shape-shifted over time. What was first the pleasure of relaxing at home turned into the what she predicted as the Mobile Cocoon or the mini-van where only ten years after the birth of Cocooning, soccer moms and their families found themselves  ‘living’ in their minivans then soon after in their four wheel drive SUVs.

As life became more fraught with rising geo-political tensions, Popcorn forecasted the Armored Cocoon – driverless home-pods equipped with hyper-security systems and filtered everything, including information. After that, she foresaw the Regenerative Cocoon — our homes as wellness-enhancing spaces that respond to our bio-data and curate the perfect, restorative environment along with a custom-fitted to you, robotic companion and service provider. Yes, including sex.

Always projecting at least a decade forward Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve provides our clients with a vivid and ever changing FutureScape that allows them to create preemptive strategies and mind-blowing innovation. Armed with our TrendBank, the future is never a surprise, but a platform from which to profit. Now, they can create breakthrough innovation for a next that the competition hasn’t even begun to imagine.

A 95% accuracy rate is no accident, it’s Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve, the Sherpa to the Future for the Fortune 200 and the world.