ANGELA DAIDONE, Staff Writer
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
08-25-2000
AT THE CORNER OF MADISON AND DIVINE
By ANGELA DAIDONE, Staff Writer
Date: 08-25-2000, Friday
Section: BUSINESS
Edition: All Editions -- Two Star B, Two Star P, One Star B
Tiger Woods, prepare to meet your match.
If one marketing and advertising trend spotter is right, the next
top product endorser will not be a world-class athlete or the movie
star, but will have celebrity status of the highest order.
God will be the way to go.
So says Marian Salzman, founder and director of The Intelligence
Factory (formerly called the Brand Futures Group), a subsidiary of Young
& Rubicam Inc., a New York-based communications company that owns
several ad, marketing consultancy, and public relations firms.
"God and spirituality are definitely going to play a major role in
how businesses market their products and how consumers respond to that
market in the future," said Salzman.
A 40-year-old River Edge native, Salzman has made a career of
predicting market trends and how they will impact the economy.
Increasingly major corporations, retailers, and advertisers are seeking
out trend spotters for information that might give them an edge in
shaping strategic planning, corporate structuring, and budgeting
advertising dollars.
Salzman said she drew her conclusions about God after several years
of examining social patterns of consumers.
"We are living in a very antisocial time," she said. "Divorce is
keeping people apart. Families aren't spending time with each other. And
to a large degree, telecommunications has become a barrier for people to
interact face to face. We're becoming a barrier culture."
As a result, she said, more and more people are seeking out things
of a spiritual nature to find solace or to fill some void.
"We've seen the influence of God in jewelry, like the WWJD
bracelets [What Would Jesus Do?], books, and movies," said Salzman.
"This trend will move right into the mainstream marketplace."
Despite being dismissed by some for engaging in a kind of marketing
quackery, professional trend spotters like Salzman, are a growing breed
who spend their working days gathering information -- through surveys,
interviews, and observation.
"Trend spotters go out and test the markets, and then come back to
tell their clients what's hot and what's going to be hotter down the
line," said Rick Kean, executive director of the Business Marketing
Association.
"The alternative is to go out and do [the research] yourself. It's
terribly expensive, and who has time for that? So why not have someone
else do it for you?
"They [trend spotters] have an ear to the ground, and reports from
the industry have shown that they are about 99 percent accurate."
However, according to Professor Robert Rothberg of the Rutgers
Graduate School of Management, corporate prognosticators may be getting
credit for simply delivering self-fulfilling prophecies.
"Things have a way of coming true because of who's making the
statement," said Rothberg, whose specialty is teaching strategic
planning and new product development at Rutgers. "Sometimes, there's an
agreement to agree with what a forecaster has to say."
In the early 1990s, Salzman said her group pioneered youth and
Generation X research for companies that included Levi's, Reebok, and
Nike, all of whom were seeking a way to inject some new life into their
products to appeal to the younger consumer market.
Salzman said that "scouts" tracked shopping habits, studied the
socioeconomic patterns in various diverse areas across the country, and
asked questions such as: What kind of music was popular? Who were the
role models? How much money were they willing to spend on any given
item? Subsequently, the giant clothing manufacturers came up with
designs to reflect the changing face of their customer base.
"These companies realized that they needed to give kids exactly
what they wanted. What came along was the African-American-influenced
hip-hop clothing," said Salzman, who is advising clients that the next
shift will be to accommodate the growing influence of Hispanic culture,
especially in the music industry.
The Internet has helped some forecasters with their work, although
the most valuable insight is gained from field work, Salzman said.
"Getting right into people's back yards, into their worlds, has
become particularly vital to the industry," she said. This means
spending time in rural areas and out-of-the-way places, as well as in
big cities, to get a handle on specific consumer markets. Salzman's
research has taken her across the globe, into South African villages,
German farmlands, and Oklahoma trailer parks.
"American business is definitely not just what happens in New York
City or Los Angeles. It's blue-collar towns, it's all ages and
lifestyles. Sometimes we get our best sense of what's coming when we
look in untraditional places," she said.
Don Lepone, founder and president of the Lepone Group, a marketing
consultant firm in Oradell, said his company was skeptical at first of
corporate soothsaying, but changes in the marketplace prompted a change
in his thinking. Lepone's firm now routinely employs trend-spotting
techniques to assist its clients in designing business plans.
"Once upon a time, it was enough to do business in the short term.
But look at the way the world is today, everything moves so quickly. We
have to think further down the line if you want to keep attracting
customers. You have to have a pulse on what's happening now and what's
going to happen," Lepone said.
Despite its perceived value, trend spotting is anything but a
perfect science. The future of marketing for one soothsayer may well be
yesterday's icon for others.
Gerald Celente, editor and publisher of The Trends Journal, the
publication of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, has a vastly
different take on Salzman's prediction that God is the "next big
thing."
"As far as I'm concerned, God is dead," he said. "Oh, maybe God is
slipping in here and there, but it'll be a different kind of personal
spirituality, not religion, that will make its way into the
marketplace."
Rothberg of Rutgers had another view: "To say that God will be the
next product spokesperson may very well be the height of affront."
Staff Writer Angela Daidone's e-mail address is daidone(at)bergen.com
Illustrations/Photos: COLOR DRAWING
Keywords: RELIGION. ADVERTISING
Copyright 2000 Bergen Record Corp. All rights reserved.
