Microtrends ebook

He speaks to the next wave of developments coming in technology, social movements, and even dating. Offering a clear vision of the future of business, politics, and culture, Microtrends Squared is a must-read for innovators and entrepreneurs, political and business leaders, and for every curious reader looking to understand the wave of the future when it is just a ripple.

Mark Penn has spent over forty years in polling, marketing, advertising, and strategy at the highest levels of business and politics. Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love. Sign up and get a free ebook! With Meredith Fineman. About The Book. About The Author.

Mark Penn. Mark Penn, the man who identified "Soccer Moms" as a crucial constituency in President Clinton's reelection campaign, is known for his ability to detect relatively small patterns of behavior in our culture-microtrends that are wielding great influence on business, politics, and our personal lives. Only one percent of the public, or three million people, is enough to launch a business or social movement.

Relying on some of the best data available, Penn identifies more than 70 microtrends in religion, leisure, politics, and family life that are changing the way we live. Among them: People are retiring but continuing to work. Teens are turning to knitting. Geeks are becoming the most sociable people around. Women are driving technology. Dads are older than ever and spending more time with their kids than in the past. You have to look at and interpret data to know what's going on, and that conventional wisdom is almost always wrong and outdated.

The nation is no longer a melting pot. We are a collection of communities with many individual tastes and lifestyles. Those who recognize these emerging groups will prosper. Penn shows readers how to identify the microtrends that can transform a business enterprise, tip an election, spark a movement, or change your life.

In today's world, small groups can have the biggest impact. Mark Penn - Author E. Sociology Nonfiction. Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget.

You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again. But, as other reviewers have mentioned, he gets bogged down in reporting all sorts of less-thanpercenters that he just finds interesting and his thesis loses steam. He goes from reporting statistically significant groups to ranting about This book started out interesting but bogged down quickly in partisan remarks, personal observations, guesses and random statistics.

He goes from reporting statistically significant groups to ranting about what he considers to be interesting. I finished the book because I'm strange that way--unless the book is actively offensive, I finish it.

But it was hard work and I liked his voice less and less until finally at the end I really disliked it. My recommendation? Pick it up and skim through the parts that seem interesting to you but don't waste your time reading the whole. This book outlines the changes that are happening in our population which are likely to affect the next decade of purchasing decisions.

I probably wouldn't have picked up this book if it weren't the only non-fiction business audio that I hadn't yet read at my local library, but I'm so glad I did.

It's a cross between "Blink" and "The Long Tail" the way that it derives informations based on hard numbers. What makes it better than the "The Long Tail" or "Small Is the New Big" is that it actually h This book outlines the changes that are happening in our population which are likely to affect the next decade of purchasing decisions.

What makes it better than the "The Long Tail" or "Small Is the New Big" is that it actually highlights all of the markets which are currently being under-served with products and services. It opens up a whole new world of industries and segments to market to and makes them easy to understand from a marketing perspective.

If you're a business owner or in the advertising world, you need to wake up and read this book. Nov 01, Paige Reinhard rated it liked it. Borat, BlackBerries and MySpace. This is the single most book I have ever read. Sep 09, Dan rated it it was ok. Unfortunately, after some promising early chapters of the book, where Penn manages to speak authoritatively on matters of his expertise namely, politics , it rapidly becomes clear that the scope of this topic has overwhelmed and exhausted the knowledge of the author.

Before I continue, for the partisan-wary out there, I share much of the political leanings of Penn, so my criticism is not drawn from some sort of righteous indignation at the pokes and jabs at the political right scattered throughout the text. They were some of the only enjoyable parts, past a certain point.

If Penn had stayed on the topics where he has demonstrated himself a capable curator he was the campaign manager for Bill Clinton's successful re-election campaign , this book might have remained valid if somewhat limited in scope. Instead, Penn takes us on a whirlwind tour of every tiny trend that he can seem to find.

Much of the time when entering a new section of one of the 75 "Microtrends shaping tomorrow's big changes", I would wonder where the editor had wandered off to. Towards the end, it seems more and more clear that Penn is wildly out-of-touch with the current generation. One favorite example is when he takes data from a text-in poll of a couple hundred Californians aged 16 to 22 seriously.

The question, "What profession do you want to be when you are settled in a career? What follows is a long diatribe on how the "Rules of Engagement" for war have changed and how interesting it is that so many young people are interested in becoming gunners.

Isn't part of being a statistician knowing when your data is flawed? On the other end of the scale, we have mystifying chapters like the one about porn on the internet. Practically anyone over the age of puberty and with a computer has stumbled either purposefully, or accidentally over porn websites, as they are ubiquitous. Penn's treatment of the subject feels dewy-eyed and strange.

Amusingly, the outdated opinions of Penn were highlighted by the choice of the reader that was used for recording the Microtrends audiobook. The reader kept mispronouncing words like Yahoo, and Google, leading one to wonder from what rock he was recently unearthed out from. All of this is not to say that there aren't interesting parts of this book.

However, the chapters that clearly miss the boat call into question the validity of the approach and the premise of many of the other chapters. I didn't start paying active attention to the methods used to gather the statistics that Penn uses in this book until my credulity was stretched too far.

After this, I began to wonder about many of the chapters that I had already read, and I must admit that any magic the book might have once had was deflated. Penn would have done himself, and us, a favor to not stretch his attention between so many topics. May 17, Alex rated it did not like it. I had decided in the first quarter of the book that this was not a good read, but as with most other not-so-good books I have read in the past, I had to finish it - some kind of an OCD need to come to a conclusion?

Once I decided to hate the book, I was going to start taking notes in the margins of the points I disagreed with and the shoddy throwaway attempts at humor that peppered Penn's research, but I am far too lazy to do that. So then my next plan was to just dog-ear some pages and quote fr I had decided in the first quarter of the book that this was not a good read, but as with most other not-so-good books I have read in the past, I had to finish it - some kind of an OCD need to come to a conclusion?

So then my next plan was to just dog-ear some pages and quote from them, but I left the book in Texas when I finished it The topic is an interesting one, interesting enough for me to read non-fiction a rarity. And some of his findings were very interesting - I have and will continue to mention them conversationally.

For example, there are more straight women out there than straight men, so there are going to be a subset of the female population who never gets married because there aren't enough guys. The one that pissed me off the most was his look at Calorie-Restricting Diets. By his own admission in that section, he says that there are really only several thousand participants of this specific diet, which is a long way off 3,, Other trends are tough to quantify, yet he still tried to - ex.

Long-Attention-Span People must all run marathons because that takes a long time?!? I think had Penn taken his 20 or 25 strongest microtrends and expounded upon them, he would have had a more solid thesis and if he had listened to an editor, he would have had a more well-written text.

But as it stands, this book was a chore and a bore. I occasionally chose to read a book that purports to tell the future, or gather together trends that will be continuing or growing. And sometimes, I read one of these books with some age on it. In this book, the author recognizes and documents a few dozen trends, and on review, he has a pretty good track record.

Many, if not most of the trends discussed include one small but noticeable microtrend, but also its polar opposite. Sort of like if yo I occasionally chose to read a book that purports to tell the future, or gather together trends that will be continuing or growing.

So these trends are a kind of a double dip. When you read older futurist books, you look for the mistakes. There was a couple of times where then-current technologies were expected to continue to grow, like Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

The author also missed some technology trends, or underestimated them, in particular mobile and cloud technology and their impact on many areas of society. But overall, I found this interesting, and pretty well done. Oct 25, Karen rated it liked it. Fascinating book by Democratic pollster Mark Penn. Famous for unearthing and coining the term "soccer moms," Penn explains how relatively small subgroups of the population can launch a social or political revolution. Penn believes George W. Bush can thank Protestant Latinos, who favored Al Gore in , for his win in Such concept reshapes our current understanding of trends and economics, but it really puts into perspective, how the current disruptions that we are now living with have happened.

These micro trends are illustrated under several examples that Mark has identified through his career in politics. Such examples, that were exposed 10 years ago, are now proven to be very real and I would love read a current edition of this book re assessing these speculations and the impact that most of them caused. Aug 23, Gavin Richardson rated it liked it. This had some interesting trends, but being an older book I was curious how they examined trends and took action or connected them to larger events.

It never really did that for me. Aug 06, Rodrigo rated it liked it. Very interesting and easy reading. But it seems that Mark Penn is doing exactly what he criticizes so much in others: ignoring some "atoms" of this world. After reading his book one comes with the feeling that, somehow, Latin America and Africa have just vanished, and that all that matters in this world is the US which he insists in calling "America", ignoring the fact that for more than half of the world "America" is a continent, not a country: isn't that a trend?

It's funny to read in the chapter dedicated to Chinese artists that, as Mr. Penn says, "in the West" porcelain is called simply "china".