John Lennon was right about so many things. This morning it was instant karma.

On my way to work I stopped at the farmer’s market for a single tomato and two ears of corn for dinner. Short on time and low on space in my bike bag, I was determined to keep it at that despite the irresistible bounty of mid-summer. As I passed a pile of peaches, I wavered. They were a deep orange red, plump, and I could tell they were soft before I even touched one. I quickly chose two for dessert.

As I was walking away from the stand, an old man stopped me. He appeared to be homeless. The calm in his manner made me hesitate. As I looked into his sad brown eyes I saw they were cloudy with cataracts. He asked in a soft voice, “Could you help me out please and buy me a peach? I’m a little hungry.”

The specificity of the request moved me immediately. I reached into my bag and pulled out one of the big, beautiful peaches I’d just bought, “How about this?”

He took the peach, looked at it approvingly, turned and walked away. After a couple of steps I saw him take a bite. Walking along beside him I asked, genuinely curious, “How is it? Is it good?”

He nodded and continued on. His focus told me it was.

For a second I considered replacing it, but realized I didn’t have time. I hadn’t come for peaches in the first place, and though the thought of sharing those peaches with my husband made me happy, I was happier having given one to the old man. I was down a peach but uplifted. A fair trade, I thought.

A few minutes later, in another area of the farmers market I went to retrieve my bike. As I passed the last booth, a young man who was restocking his display, reached under the table into a box and pulled out a fruit. Without turning to look at me, he swung it behind his back and said, “Would you like a peach?” I looked around and then at him. “I’m offering you a peach,” he said and handed it to me. I took it, wondering if he wanted payment, but he had moved on. “Thanks,” I said to his back.

I stared at the peach as the old man had done. In awe at the perfect symmetry of the exchange, I stood there with the peach in my hand. I smiled as my senses extended beyond the fuzzy fruit and into the buzz of the farmer’s market as people raced around me. For a second I actually felt the rotation of the entire universe and all of us in it.

The way some marketers talk about “consumers” you’d think they were talking about a different breed altogether from human beings.

My partner and I had a phone call recently with a brand manager at a major consumer goods company. We’re planning to do some in-home research interviews for this company and we were on the phone explaining to her our process.

At one point we could tell we’d lost her. She was quiet in a way that suggested she was chewing on something we’d said earlier. Figuring it was a question related to the deliverable or the process, we paused for a check-in.

Her major concern? Where ever will you find these people?

At first we didn’t understand the question. Then we realized that the gulf between her understanding of the “consumer” and the idea of real people moving through their daily activities was so enormous it was stopping her in her tracks. Continue Reading »

Not long ago, I threw in the towel. Somewhere between Bloc Party and Cold War Kids, I lost the plot of popular music. Once I was able to navigate the changing soundscape with ease, if not arrogance. I read Fader cover-to-cover. I streamed radio from the UK. I was on the guest list. Plus one.

Now most of the music I hear is in yoga class.

Through much of my career as a pop culture theorist and brand strategist, my obsession with music served me well. Hip-hop music introduced me to cultural anthropology. As a teenager in Kentucky, I knew every lyric to Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It, but it took years of investigation to figure out many of the South Central LA references. I loved the thrill of experiencing another culture through music.

Being attuned to music also helped me decode that most mystifying of target audiences: youth. For global youth culture, English is the language of communication, but music is the music of relating. I could access pretty much any international culture or homegrown subculture through its music. I was able to establish credibility with my subjects through an intricate game of name-dropping and code switching.

My love for the music was genuine, so the references were meaningful and always led to valuable conversations. Music was the bridge. Simply having been to see a particular artist or knowing about an upcoming album release could mean the difference between a surface-level engagement and true bonding. As long as I was up on music, I was in. I looked at people older than me on the subway with their pathetic iPod selections and outdated playlists and thought: OLD. I formed the naïve belief that losing my grip on music would signal not just the end of youth for me, but the end of my career in pop culture.

Yes, I had a tendency in those days towards black or white thinking.

A few years and life changes later, I started to feel my grasp on popular music slipping. Continue Reading »

A Moment of Clarity
March 2, 1966
“A flash of sanity: the momentary realization that there is no need to come to certain conclusions about persons, events, conflicts, trends, even trends towards evil and disaster, as if from day to day, and even from moment to moment, I had to know and declare (at least to myself) that this is so and so, this is good, this is bad. We are heading for a “new era” or we are heading for destruction. What do such judgments mean? Little or nothing. Things are as they are in an immense whole of which I am a part and which I cannot pretend to grasp. To say I grasp it is to immediately put myself in a false position, as if I were “outside” it. Whereas to be “in” it is to seek the truth in my own life and action, moving where movement is possible and keeping still when movement is unnecessary, realizing that things will continue to define themselves and that the judgments and mercies of God will clarify themselves and will be more clear to me if I am silent and attentive, obedient to His will, rather than constantly formulating statements in this age which is smothered in language, in meaningless and inconclusive debate in which, in the last analysis, nobody listens to anything except what agrees with his own prejudices.” –A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals

There is so much wisdom encapsulated in this journal entry I hate to take it into a business context, but it did strike me deeply as a writer (often welding words onto experiences) and recovering trendspotter.

Trends have become a crutch in marketing. Companies unable to open their eyes to their current reality crane their necks forward, looking for the sure thing that will get them to the future first.

In my own life and professional practice, I have stopped trying to harness the future, and have instead focused my senses and instincts on getting to the truth that is the present moment. When companies hire me to do trends, I tell them that I won’t guarantee the future, but what I can do is bring them a multi-dimensional, inspirational, accurate, and thought-provoking portrait of what is. What they do with that is up to them…and that is the future. It’s not something that happens to you, it’s something you make yourself.

On April 8, I was in D.C. with some inspirational young people. I was asked to work with Tom Standage of The Economist to pull together a panel called “The Facebook Generation” for IAA’s bi-annual conference. Though the original intent of the panel was to simply put some young people on stage and ask them about their media habits, we turned it into an opportunity for some of these up-and-comers to talk about how they are changing the future of marketing. We had a blast. You can check out the panel in its entirety. Click here.