Clicking: 16 Trends to Future Fit Your Life, Your Work, and Your Business

The best-selling author of The Popcorn Report offers readers guidelines for using major societal trends--including "anchoring," "clanning," and "pleasure revenge"--to make choices for improving career, relationships, lifestyle, and appearance. $120,000 ad/promo. Tour.

"Clicking," in the authors' lexicon, means finding one's niche in work, lifestyle or relationships. Marketing consultants Popcorn and Marigold, in their bestselling book The Popcorn Report, told companies how to capitalize on trends in consumer behavior and society. Here the emphasis is on how individuals can click by recognizing and adapting to such trends as Icon Toppling (widespread rejection of authority figures in business and government) and Anchoring, or grounding oneself by seeking spiritual roots in the past. Another new trend alleged here is FemaleThink, a shift from traditional male goal-oriented, hierarchical relations to more caring and sharing, family-oriented approaches. Peppered with success stories involving entrepreneurs, professionals, corporations and small businesses, this upbeat manual includes chapters on finding a new career and how parents can help kids get on the right path. Popcorn and Marigold (chairman and creative director, respectively, of BrainReserve) throw off ideas like sparks in all directions, and their suggestions for blending ethics, passion and profit will jolt those stuck in a rut. Illustrated. 150,000 first printing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Popcorn's ``click'' has nothing to do with either feminist consciousness or the PC mouse. Rather, for the social-trend prognosticator extraordinaire, it defines finding your proper slot in a rapidly changing world. For Popcorn, this involves identifying some new trends and occasionally reminding us how right-on she was with her past predictions in The Popcorn Report (also coauthored with Marigold). How can you click? Popcorn counts the ways. You can click by Wildering (not to be confused with wilding), a kind of fantasy adventure; you can click by Anchoring, or pursuing spirituality; you can click by volunteering.. Popcorn's not one for fine distinctions here--megachurches will do as well for spiritual seekers as more intimate locations. The trend is everything: Just pick one and ride it until you feel yourself click into place. (First printing of 150,000) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Marketing expert Popcorn (The Popcorn Report, LJ 9/15/91) goes a step further here in forecasting trends that will change our lives. With Marigold, the creative director of Popcorn's firm, BrainReserve, she starts off with a simple analogy of mastering control of your life by opening a safe. With the right combinations, you can "click" into new beginnings. This is achieved by diligent reading and connecting past events to the present. As the mainstays of our society change, causing instability in jobs, government, medicine, and education-here called "icon toppling"-Popcorn asserts that we can redirect ourselves if we focus on and become aware of our surroundings. Parents will be especially interested in a section on "Kids and Clicking." Popcorn includes her firm's reading list and sample exercises on how to expand ideas into a broader context to stimulate thinking. Inspiring and upbeat, her work nonetheless could have been abbreviated. Recommended for public libraries and marketing collections.
Bellinda Wise, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Faith Popcorn is back! Along with Marigold, a creative director at Popcorn's marketing consulting firm, BrainReserve, the two serve up their insights into the popular culture. Ten of their 16 trends were profiled previously in The Popcorn Report (1991), and Clicking seems an attempt to run unpopped kernels through the microwave again. Admittedly, the authors bring us up to date on such phenomena as cocooning, cashing out, vigilante consumerism, and ergonomics. Newer ideas include icon toppling and a look at evolving changes in gender roles with FemaleThink and mancipation. One may argue that Popcorn does not actually forecast trends. She is, rather, particularly adept at spotting them and, more importantly, labeling them with catchy, sound-bite names that appeal to lifestyle commentators and headline writers. The result is more attention to her and her "predictions" so that they become self-fulfilling prophesies. And the authors' cleverly chosen title, with its many levels of meaning, will undoubtedly "click." David Rouse