Microtrends (English)

Mark Penn sweats the small stuff--or at least he notices it: the many niches of everyday life that reveal lifestyle trends of interest to marketers, the media, government and just about all of us. In this serious but entertaining study, Penn identifies over 70 new types that comprise the many facets of the way we live now, among them "thirty winkers," who get little sleep, through "Old New Dads" (Mick Jigger is one), "second home buyers," "powerful petites" ("little women are big business"), "Impressionable Elites" (who have money to spend), "America's home schooled", "Vietnamese Entrepreneurs", and "educated terrorists" (the small stuff we should sweat). Penn organizes these groups into larger cluster categories such as love, work, race and religion, health and wellness, etc., and for each micro trend type provides several pages of succinct analysis telling who they are, their interests, and why they are important. Penn sees a great individualism at play here, and a change in American society from what he calls a "Ford economy" to a "Starbucks economy." It's a fun read, and readers will probably identify with more than one of the micro trends, which the author says are "the seeds of unexpected change." MICROTRENDS includes a generous list of sources for further study. minimize