Born as Faith Plotkin, she later legally changed her name to “Faith Popcorn.” She was born in New York City, where both of her parents were lawyers 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. Accepted into NYU Law School, she decided instead to go into advertising in the early 1970s, which she said she considered to be more glamorous.
After working in advertising for eight years,she founded the marketing consulting firm BrainReserve in 1974. 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.
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”[12] of 10,000 experts who provide forecasts about trends across many topics. It also analyzes newspapers, magazine and other sources, and conducts thousands of consumer interviews to spot future trends.
Faith’s Fur Babies
