So much about success in entrepreneurship is doing your best to predict the future. But forecasting what’s coming next is Faith Popcorn’s business. Related: What is a misconception people have about what is required to predict customer and industry trends? We do a lot of forward futurism and then we backtrack with our talent bank to see when some of this will manifest. Our assignment was exactly this: What is the future of film? We went through our process, interviews, talent town bank, put a big team on it. That's happened a couple of times, [where] I'm fired for, I guess, telling the truth. Eighteen years ago I adopted a Chinese baby who was 10 months old and I became a totally different person. And I've helped a lot of people adopt babies since then because I'm really good at figuring out the process. For me, success is now trying to leave a legacy of futurism to try and help my clients, my friends, my fans to understand how to look at what's coming and how to use it.
In this series, Open Every Door, Entrepreneur staff writer Nina Zipkin shares her conversations with leaders about understanding what you have to offer, navigating the obstacles that will block your path, identifying opportunity and creating it for yourself and for others.
So much about success in entrepreneurship is doing your best to predict the future. But forecasting what’s coming next is Faith Popcorn’s business.
Popcorn is the founder and CEO of Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve. The fifth-generation New Yorker launched her company out of a studio apartment when she was just 27 years old. Now, the 70-year-old mother of two and her team at BrainReserve are known for helping companies protect and prepare their products and services, investments and business plans from unexpected reversals in the market — with a 95 percent accuracy rate.
She is the best-selling author of books such as The Popcorn Report, Clicking, Eveolution: Understanding Women–Eight Essential Truths That Work in Your Business and Your Life and Dictionary of the Future. She has been dubbed “The Trend Oracle” by The New York Times, and Fortune Magazine called her “The Nostradamus of Marketing.”
Over the last four decades she has worked with big name entities such as American Express, Bayer, Campbell’s Soup, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, KFC, SC Johnson, Tylenol and The United States Postal Service.
We caught up with Popcorn to get her insights about not being afraid to tell the truth.
Related:
What is a misconception people have about what is required to predict customer and industry trends?
I think the misconception that people have is that we’re in a basement with a martini and a crystal ball. I think that they don’t understand that we have had a consulting company for 43 years. It’s not fluffy. We have a 32-step methodology. We’re reading everything that’s being put out. We have a talent bank that’s 10,000 futurists and we’re in constant contact with them, seeing what they’re working on, seeing what they’re thinking. We do a lot of forward futurism and then we backtrack with our talent bank to see when some of this will manifest.
So in 1981, we said people will be buying from the internet and that supermarkets would be much less interesting. We talked to P&G and others, and to say they laughed at us is an understatement. How did we figure that out? A multitude of interviews with mainly female customers who were going to supermarkets and telling us how much they hated them. We had interviews and conferences with people that were inventing the pre-Amazon pre-delivery services. We could visualize easily a day where everything…
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