Chapter 5 English preface

In 1960, a Volkswagen ad that rocked the automotive world had the whole picture in just a few words: Think small.It was a revolutionary idea — a call to change your mind, lower your expectations, and downsize, in a time when success was all about capital appreciation and expanding your footprint, even while you were driving on the road. As the United States was becoming a world superpower, growing into a dominant economy, setting the pace for the global marketplace, the Volkswagen Beetle was introduced as a countercultural phenomenon— This represents the complete opposite of the 1950s idea of ​​everything being big.

America has never been used to cars since it had cars.But ask two-thirds of Americans, and they'll tell you they all work for small businesses.Americans are only willing to make big changes if they first see the small, concrete steps that will lead to big changes.Moreover, they yearn for the small-town American lifestyle.Today, many of America's biggest sports are small -- generally, invisible to all but the most careful observers. is based on the idea that some of the most powerful forces emerging in our society are trends that, contrary to our intuition, are shaping the tomorrow that soon lies before us.With so many people paying attention to the crimes of boys and girls, it is difficult to see that young people who are completely different from the past are coming.With so many people citing poverty as the cause of terrorism, it is hard to see that wealthy, educated terrorists are behind many of the attacks.With so many people looking at the big, organized religions, it's hard to see that it's the new, small denominations that are growing the fastest.

The power of individual choices has never been great, and the reasons and ways of those choices have never been difficult to understand or analyze.The art of targeting the small — identifying those small, densely populated subgroups and communicating with them about their individual needs — has never been more emphasized in marketing or political campaigns.The one-size-fits-all approach to the world is no longer working. Thirty years ago, I read a book in Harvard's Lamont Library that began, "This little book takes a different view from the prevailing view, it is anti-traditional." The point, the point is: Voters are not fools."Its author, VO Key, Jr., came up with a perspective that has guided how I think about voters, consumers, corporations, governments, and the world ever since that day.If you look at the facts with the right tools, it turns out that the average American is actually quite intelligent and makes some very rational choices.

But almost every day I hear pundits say that voters and consumers are misguided mindless people who make decisions based on the color of a tie.That's why politicians pay consultants who tell them to wear a brown suit or get wrinkles out of their faces.This is why many commercials often tell stories that have nothing to do with the product.Candidates and business people often do not believe important facts and results, and they are often the fools.I would bet that at least two-thirds of all information exchanged is wasted because it is words and images that only the maker understands. The point of this book is that, 30 years later, VO Xiaoji's views not only still stand, but should be the guiding principles for understanding the various trends emerging in the United States and in the world.People are not very sophisticated, not more individual, not more knowledgeable about the choices they make in everyday life.But as VO Xiaoji said, serious scientific research is necessary to discover the logical patterns hidden under these choices.When faced with what people seem to be contradictory choices, it may be much easier to boil them down to tan suits and Botox.

In fact, today's various contradictions are obvious.While people have never been more infatuated with healthy food, sales of Big Macs at McDonald's chains have never been lower.News of the anti-war movement dominated the front pages of most newspapers, although Fox News was number one.Although America is getting older, the America we see in commercials and entertainment is forever young in our hearts.Although people don't date as much as they used to, they care more about deeper and longer-lasting relationships.While more people than ever are drinking plain water with no additives, more people are drinking energy drinks with added chemicals and caffeine, such as Magic, than ever before.

In fact, the whole idea of ​​a few megatrends determining the way America and the world develop is losing ground.The great power that can hold us all together no longer exists.Instead, America and the world are being distanced by a tangle of choices that abound in “minitrends”—small, A power that even radar can't detect——in. The claim that "small" is the new "big" seems ill-founded.To really know what's going on, we need better tools than our eyes and our nimble tongues.We need the equivalent of powerful telescopes and microscopes, which in sociological terms are polls, surveys and statistics.These methods make it possible to cut a small piece of the object to be studied, put it under a microscope, magnify it, and study it more clearly.You will learn more about yourself, your friends, your clients, your clients, and your competitors in this research than you ever imagined possible.

While working for President Clinton in 1996, I discovered an under-the-radar group that came to be known as "Soccer Moms." (I'd love to do something for the young football movement, even though that's not what I'm actually talking about. The term is reserved for suburban women who are busy with work and childcare and who really care about the president's policies people.) Before that campaign, it was generally assumed that politics was run by men, that men decided who their families voted for.But in 1996, the reality was that most male voters had made up their minds about the election.The ones left to influence are new groups of independent mothers who care about their jobs and their children, and haven't yet decided which political party is better for their families.They, not their husbands, are the decisive swing voters.To win them over, President Clinton launched a campaign to reach out to mothers who raised children—drug testing in schools, measures to keep kids from smoking, restrictions on violence in the media, restrictions on uniforms.These mothers don't really need more government in their lives, but they're happy to have a little bit of government in their children's lives to keep them in the right place.

In retrospect, a profound political change was brought about by the discovery of such a small trend.Previously, nearly all Democrats had their eyes on lower-class, non-college workers, especially the manufacturing sector.But union membership is dwindling, manufacturing employment is shrinking, more people are going to college, and nearly all voters in America describe themselves as middle class.If Democrats ignore these important trends, they will miss out. Candidates are now eyeing "soccer moms" with gusto -- even though they're told that these trends are moving fast, and that "soccer moms" are moving forward.Now 10 years later, their children are preparing for college, many of them are divorced, and their own financial security has become as big an issue for them as raising children was 10 years ago.

With all the attention given to moms, dads — suburban, family-focused, office-worked dads — get overlooked politically, in advertising and in the media .In the 21st century, dads spend more time with their children than at any other time in history.Has the ad on Madison Avenue changed?Are dads the targets of the back-to-school movement? In the future of marketing, there may be a shift not dissimilar to that seen in Democratic politics in 1996. The trick to spotting trends through polling is finding groups that are taking the same actions and pursuing common aspirations, coming together from the start, or by embodying the right appeal of what they need. "Soccer moms" have been around for more than a decade, but they can only become a political class if they are seen as a hugely influential voting bloc in the United States.

Today, the combination of changing lifestyles, the Internet, the miniaturization of communication, and the globalization of the economy have given new meaning to individualism, and this new individualism is powerfully transforming our society.The world may be getting flatter, according to globalization, but it's populated by six billion little elves who won't just follow a crowd and be yelled at.No matter how outlandish their choices, they can find a hundred thousand or more others who share their tastes or interests. In fact, if a trend touches one percent of the population, it can have an impact on a movie, a bestseller, or a new political movement.The power of individual choice is increasingly affecting politics, religion, entertainment, and even war.In today's mass society, it is enough to form a movement that can change the world if only one percent of people sincerely make a choice that is opposite to the mainstream people.

Take, for example, the changes in illegal immigration in the United States.A few years ago they were forgotten residents of the United States, hiding from the light of day and hiding from the authorities.And today, at a political rally where they live with their legally voting relatives, they may become the new "soccer moms."These immigrants fighting to break the barriers of the immigration system are likely to be the most important voters in the next presidential election. The southwestern states where they live will have a decisive impact on the outcome of the election, and there will become a new battlefield. The same is true when it comes to doing business, as the internet connects people so easily.In the past, it was nearly impossible to market a product to various small groups scattered across the country.Finding a million people who want to taste your wine, or a million people who can't put their kids to bed at night, is a piece of cake these days. Not only is math important, but it can also be disastrous.If the Islamic terrorists convinced only one tenth of one percent of the American population that they were right, they would have 300,000 soldiers in the war of terror, enough to destabilize our society .If bin Laden could get one percent of the world's 1 billion Muslims to resort to violence, that's 10 million terrorists -- a force that dwarfs the largest military and police force on Earth group.It is the strength of these small groups that come together today. The power of choice is especially evident as more and more Americans make decisions about their own lives.For example, the US population growth rate has dropped to 0.9%, but the number of families is exploding.Among the divorced, the long-term single-livers, the long-lived and the never-married, we see an explosion in the number of people who are heads of households—almost 115 million in 2006, compared with 1980 The year is about 80 million.The percentage of households including one person living alone rose from 17 percent in 1976 to 26 percent in 2003.The proportion of married households with children fell by almost 25%. All these people who live a single, independent way of life are dividing America into hundreds of tiny parts.Single people and those without young children have more time to pursue their interests, pick up their hobbies, surf the web, argue about politics, or go out to the movies.It stands to reason that no one should go to the movies these days—you can quickly see what’s on by Internet download or pay-as-you-go—but for anyone with a comfortable Saturday night, the movies A very affordable option since theaters are raising prices, not dropping them.More people have more resources at their disposal (including money, time and energy) than ever before.They are mobilizing these resources in pursuit of personal gratification that they never had in the past.So we're getting a much clearer picture of who these people are and what they want.And whether you're dealing with an economic issue, a political issue, or a social issue, simply having that information can make a completely different decision. This book is about how the United States is divided into small parts and small parts.Why no more one America, two Americas, three Americas or eight Americas.In fact, there are hundreds of Americas, and there are hundreds of subsections made up of people brought together by common interests. A country is divided into many small parts, and this phenomenon does not only happen in the United States.In the 21st century, it is a global phenomenon that makes it extremely difficult to bring people together.Just when we think about it, thanks to the internet, the world is not only connected but finally united around shared values ​​in favor of democracy, peace and security, but what is happening right now is the exact opposite .We are bursting at a record pace. I went bowling recently and saw a phenomenon that, contrary to the very popular but misguided idea, is where no one is playing alone.In fact, the person who throws the bowling ball into the lane is neither the potbellied person who is often said, nor the person who bowls with a beer.In fact, there doesn't seem to be an iota of resemblance between one group and the other here.On the first fairway was a family of Indian immigrants, including grandparents.On the second fairway is a black mother with two small children.On the third fairway were four 1/2-year-old white kids, some with tattoos and polo shirts.Two lanes away, a Spanish-speaking man and woman, hugged and kissed every now and then, apparently dating by bowling. With the rise of freedom of choice comes the assertion of individuality.The publicity of personality brings about the expansion of choice power.The more choices people have, the more they integrate themselves into a smaller and smaller part of society. explosion of choice In 1773, perhaps only one tea was thrown overboard by the Boston Tea Party—the English morning tea.Today, if the Americans revolted, hundreds of different teas would be thrown into the harbor, from decaffeinated jasmine tea to Moroccan mint tea to Thai sweet tea. If you don't start with baked, fried, wavy, diet, salted or seasoned chips - seasoned chips are also divided into smoked chips, sweet chips, onion chips and Cheesy Pepper Potato Chips - pick and choose, you can't even buy potato chips. We live in a world of options.Today, Americans have wider freedom of choice than in the past in nearly every aspect of life, including new jobs, new foods, new religions, new technologies, and new ways of communicating and interacting. In a sense, this is the Starbucks economy over the Ford economy.In the early 1900s, Henry Ford invented the assembly line, so mass consumption—consumption of one size fits all—emerged.Thousands of workers produce a black car, repeating the same action thousands of times. Today, there are few products like this one. (Ironically, one of the few remaining products is a personal computer, one on every desk in every house, which are basically the same computers except on the side. There are some designs in the corners according to customer requirements, but if you go to an ordinary CompUSA① to buy a computer, your choice is not as large as the choice of grocery shopping in the supermarket.) Instead, Starbucks is governed by the idea that people can choose the coffee, milk, and desserts they want to enjoy, and that the greater the choice, the more satisfied people will be. (Even the simple choices of customers are unpredictable—some don't want caffeine, some don't want fat, some don't want sugar, and some will happily enjoy their beverage regardless of whether it contains caffeine, fat, or sugar.) Starbucks was successful because it was able to provide all flavors of coffee to everyone—without betting that one set of choices was better than another. In the Ford economy, many people produce a one-size-fits-all mass product; in the Starbucks economy, a few people produce thousands of tailor-made individual products. The Starbucks model seems to be gaining the upper hand. iPods didn't become popular because we could walk around and listen to music -- we could do that with Walkmans in the 1980s.They are popular because they allow us to pick and choose our favorite songs.Personal technology has become personal technology, and we can now get what we ask for in nearly every area of ​​consumption.You can even get a built-to-order car in less than a month—longer than it takes to get a pizza, but it's still amazing what technology can do. The triumph of personalization and choice is great for coffee drinkers and car buyers, but a nightmare for trend spotters.As the choices become more refined, you will definitely find it more difficult to see how the choices change. Still, it's important to keep in mind the terrorists as well as know the make of the best-selling car bought by nearly 300,000 people in the United States.Unlike any other time in history, small trends can lead to big changes.So, while spotting trends is more difficult than it used to be, the job of spotting trends is also more important. Small organizations, brought together by common needs, habits, and preferences, are emerging.They're powerful, and they're hard to spot.It is the purpose of this book to describe them in detail. power of numbers In recent years, there have been some very good books discussing several major directions in the development of the United States.The point of this book is just the opposite. America is developing in a few hundred small directions.Once these trends emerge, they can develop very quickly.They are part of our great strength, and part of what looms to challenge us. These small trends often go hand in hand.In the United States, there is a group of conspicuously fashionable urban youths, and there is a group of old people who go to church regularly.There is a group of Geeks who love new technology, and there is a group of people who hate technology.Americans are dieting more than ever before, but more people are going to restaurants for steak than ever.Politics is divided into the extremes of "red states" and "blue states," yet more voters call themselves Independents. In the 30 years since I read VO Xiaoji's book, in order to detect these trends, or to discover the changes and developments of these groups of people, I have been using the most reliable tool: numbers.Americans claim that they are a people of feelings - and by feelings we mean those things we loosely call "values."Haven't you heard many times that you should do things by feeling? In most cases, though, this advice is pretty bad.If you want the safest form of transportation, fly on a plane and stay out of cars; if you want to lose weight, count calories and forget cranberry juice and flaxseed; and if you know how to read numbers, numbers are almost always will take you where you want to go. In general, we love numbers—one of the hottest TV shows these days is even called Numb3rs.But we are also afraid of numbers.Part of the reason is that we are vastly less trained in math and science than we are in language and literature.As a nation, we suspect we're not very good at reading numbers.Reading numbers scares us almost as much as speaking in public.At the same time, numbers also attract us. Many of us have a rather skeptical attitude towards numbers because they are abused by people who are always trying to stay ahead of their schedule.Do you remember the YZK scare?Every computer user on the planet fears that their documents will be compromised by the turn of the new millennium.In fact, only one-third of the world's computers were susceptible to Y2K bugs -- and of those computers, nothing really went wrong.The same is true for bird flu. At the end of 2005, bird flu spread all over the world, but among the more than 140 cases of bird flu infection reported in Southeast Asia, only half died in the end.The reporter's pessimistic conclusion is that the mortality rate of bird flu exceeds 50%.It's really scary!But in fact, the sample of cases on which these numbers are based is only the sickest patients.Those who were infected with bird flu and did not go to the hospital were not counted.I call these reported numbers "scare statistics." I have been a researcher for 30 years, and my job is to keep the truth from the false in the numbers obtained from the survey.In working for a variety of clients, including Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Tony Blair, I Learn to break out of deep-rooted conventional prejudices and spot counterintuitive societal trends that can help you tackle big challenges.If you are an influential leader with glib advocates chattering around you every day, newspapers blaming you, and your advisers interrupting from time to time, it is time to make the right decision. Choosing becomes a difficult thing, unless you also have some elements: numbers.My job is to listen to all the arguments and then use those numbers to come up with an educated, numbers-based view of reality so that when decisions are made, leaders can have a holistic view of what is being decided , Real understanding.In my opinion, numbers without words are meaningless numbers, and likewise, words without numbers are meaningless words—you need to match the words with appropriate numbers, and you need to match the numbers with appropriate words, so that Persuasive ideas are supported by reality expressed through numbers.In later chapters of this book, we will deal with the problem of rising crime in the United States—a very difficult problem that has been the focus of countless papers and theories on everything from unemployment to the permissiveness of parents to their children. question.But when you learn that the number of felons recently released from prison has increased to 650,000 a year, you immediately think that there are some new threats on the streets, and that there should be a new set of solutions . I am a researcher and a strategist, and my role is to help clients formulate winning strategies based on numbers. In 1996, helping President Clinton win the "soccer mom" vote is an example. In 2000, I helped soon-to-be Senator Hillary Clinton campaign in Upstate New York, an area where the Democrats historically had few supporters.We broke the convention of advertising for corporations and instead had corporations distribute their ads to older voters, not younger voters.I have also advised the winners of 15 foreign presidential elections in languages ​​I have never heard let alone explained clearly, but I have always advised them on the basis of numbers, not local bias.People are often too close to the situation to see the real facts -- which would give them an objective view of what is actually happening.Leaders are very lonely, they are often at the mercy of their own staff, only to listen to local journalists tell them what happened.Compared with language, numbers can reduce a lot of useless work. I remember the day I told the new president of Colombia that his people were overwhelmingly ready for an all-out war on drugs.As most people think, they think that the country cannot just modernize and turn a blind eye to drugs.The president was silent on the subject—but in the end his chief of staff said, "Mark, you're right, but we're all going to get killed." That day, he told me about the limitations of numbers, but in the end the president and this Countries have decided to go to war against the big drug lords, and they have decided to risk their lives. This book is about the power of numbers and how numbers move America and the world.On the surface, numbers may seem like nothing, but in general, opinions without numbers are often unwise opinions.Powerful, counter-intuitive trends are in front of us, we just haven’t seen them yet, and they can be used to propel a new industry, wage a new campaign, start a new movement, It can also be used as a guide to your investment strategy.Although these trends are watching us right in front of us, in reality, we often don't see them. person who spots trends in the environment I am proud because I am one of the people who spot the trend.Alvin Toffler (Alvin Toffler) and John Naisbitt (John Naisbitt) are both leading contemporary thinkers. The former wrote a series of books such as "Future Shock" (Future Shock), and the latter wrote "Megatrends" (Megatrends), they are the first to study the huge and changing world of human behavior, and try to use facts and figures to understand this world.They got one thing right: the information age changes everything. But one thing that has changed in particular in the information age is the nature of the observed trends themselves.As we've seen throughout this book, you can't learn much about the world based on "big trends" or general experience alone.In today's divided society, if you are going to do something successfully, you must understand those groups that can only be detected by careful observation, which are developing and moving rapidly and violently in criss-crossing directions.This is the microtrend. But when most people "spot a trend," they do something quite different - which is itself a growing trend. In 2 years or 5 years or 10 years, some villa seller and sociologist will tell you 10 or 15 things you must know.Because of the changes that are taking place in this society in terms of consumption, culture and personality, they will redefine and complete the world around them with newer and more beautiful names.Yes, I will also give names to some trends in this book.But in this book, the trend isn't just a "development," like slowly moving away from cash.The trend isn't just a "shift" in the way people do things, like more women taking their husbands' names.Trends are not just a changing "preference" for a product or behavior, like the increasing use of satellite positioning systems (GPS).A microtrend is a growing group that can only be detected with careful observation, and they have needs that are currently not being met by the multitude of companies, vendors, policy makers, and other people or institutions that will affect social behavior. Painstaking research In , we study 75 groups who, through their everyday decisions, are shaping America and the world today and tomorrow.While some groups are larger than others, what they all have in common is that they are all relatively invisible—either because they are actually small in number or because conventional wisdom always fails to see their potential , sometimes even emphasizing their opposites. In some groups you will find yourself or your friends, your customers or your voters.Some groups seem very distant, some seem very interesting, and others seem pathetic.Occasionally, I will record some diametrically opposite trends.Taken together, these trends create an impressionistic picture of America and the world. Finally, we take a step back and look at the painting.No need to draw anything more.Now, the United States and the world are a collection of many tiny points, which need to be examined one by one.We will finally see what the picture that emerges is and what it means for our future.