Faith Popcorn

Biography

Born as Faith Plotkin, she later legally changed her name to "Faith Popcorn." and spent her early childhood in Shanghai before returning to the United States. She attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York City, followed by New York University.

After working in advertising for eight years, It works with companies to identify future trends that will affect their business. Popcorn is reported to have advised Coca-Cola, in 1981, to go into bottled water and to have told Kodak in the late 1980s to go into digital instead of print. Another example is Tylenol, Popcorn advised Tylenol to "make pain cool" to make it more relevant to younger generations.

She coined terms like "cocooning" ("the impulse to stay inside when the outside gets too tough and scary", such as turning a home into a nest) and "Cashing Out" ("the impulse to change one's life to a slower and more rewarding pace", sometimes manifested by people who quit corporate jobs). Her company created a "TalentBank" It also analyzes newspapers, magazine and other sources, and conducts thousands of consumer interviews to spot future trends. She also said that "second hand nostalgia" would become a trend and that advances in genetics might allow people to custom design pets with bits of their own DNA so their dogs and cats resembled them. In 2014, she predicted to The Hollywood Reporter that films would become immersive events, taking place all around the viewer, who could choose their own avatar as characters. She also predicted fan films, similar to fan fiction.

Business book author William A. Sherden takes a skeptical view of her ideas about cocooning. He provides statistics showing double-digit percentage growth in activities outside the home in the five years following her prediction. The U.S. Postal Service paid $566,000 to Popcorn to envision a viable future for the post office, an engagement that was criticized by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma in a list of 100 examples of "wasteful" spending.