Microtrends

Image via Wikipedia

This post is very much “off the cuff”, not really a review of Mark Penn‘s 2008 book “Microtrends.”

Penn describes a couple of things that are important to marketers going forward. From the introduction, which by the way, is the best essay in the whole book, talking about choices:

iPods are popular not because we can carry around music — we could do that with the Walkman in the 1980s. They are popular because they let us pick and choose our own songs. Personal technology has become personalized technology, and now we can have exactly what we want in almost every consumer area.

Of course, some of Penn’s credibility is suspect to me. As an advisor to Hillary Clinton, his company also advised Columbian policy makers on a free trade agreement that Hillary Clinton opposed. But, he seems like a smart guy… the stuff I’ve read about him though trends negative. 

But, I think the quote above has a lot of weight. His thesis is a lot like that of “The Long Tail,” popularized by Chris Anderson. There are many many small markets, which when taken together, amount to a much bigger market than the two or three at the top.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microtrends meet Max Headroom
• Mark Penn’s Colombian Adventures
• Changing the world is microtrendy
• Trend watching (the meta-trend)