After long last, I finished listening to “microtrends”. It’s the sort of book I’ve always enjoyed; chock-full of interesting but seemingly useless facts. Did you know Bill Clinton, George Bush and Ross Perot were all left-handed? Or that Barack Obama and Halle Berry were both raised by their single white mothers?
How author Mark Penn seems able to justify the book’s length (the audiobook was 12 hours) is by pointing out the implications of these “microtrends”.
At my workplace (an interactive marketing agency), we talk of personalization and fostering online communities on a daily basis. Penn is right on track with this line of thinking, explicitly calling out the type of support that these various groups could benefit from in the online space.
Appealing to these various groups was addressed not only in the context of business getting to know their clients (Penn points out that young girls are greater consumers of electronics than young boys, yet stores like Best Buy and Radio Shack don’t appear to be appealing to that demographic), but also in politics. There is plenty of discussion given to the ever-important swing voters, in the U.S. as well as abroad.
I’ll admit that by trend 65 or so, I was anxious to finish the recording and move on (up next: punk marketing!), but the conclusion did wonderfully to tie things together. Just as the discovery of atoms allows us to explain the changes in solid matter, the recognition of these tiny microtrends can help explain changes and developments we see in society. Even the slightest variations may prove to have dramatic effects.
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