Trend-spotting American guru dismisses tyranny of distance

By Karyn Scherer

Marian Salzman has been in New Zealand for just a few days, but she has already got us Kiwis summed up.

We are, apparently, a rather glum, conservative lot, but we're very bright and well-travelled. We should, she suggests, cheer up. We've got a lot to be happy about.

New Zealand, she believes, is ideally poised to capitalise on the information age, now that distance is being overcome by technology and knowledge is the new power tool.

It's hardly a new idea, but given that it's coming from one of the world's more prominent trend-spotting gurus, it's nice to know she's on our side.

Well, sort of on our side. The New York-based head of Young & Rubicam's research division, the Brand Futures Group, also confesses to being somewhat concerned by our apparent reluctance to take risks.

"I've never seen a population that's so bright and so able but so unwilling to stand up," she muses.

In fact this is not Salzman's first visit to New Zealand, nor is it likely to be her last. And it has to be said, she definitely doesn't fit the stereotypical image of the ignorant American.

She knows all about the "tall poppy" syndrome, and happily swaps gossip about the Kevin Roberts saga (she confesses he is the only New Zealand business icon she can think of, "and God knows he's had his poppy head cut off for sure").
Speaking of Kevin Roberts, how would she sell New Zealand?

"Selling New Zealand overseas is not the hardest thing in the world to do. People have misunderstood how far away it is, and misunderstood what there is to do here. I don't think people really understand what's here and don't think they understand how modern it is."

Having said that, she admits, "I don't think there's any one special thing about New Zealand that draws people here. We love the idea of this very green country, but are we going to take a trip here just because it's green? I'm not totally sure."

Like most trend-spotting organisations, Y&R's Brand Futures Group claims to have been right about quite a few things so far. Like the gradual erosion of family values in Asia, for example, the trendiness of wine, and the return to fashion of "real" women.

Not that it's easy to swallow such absurd statements as: "the new age of heightened desirability is 36." Thirty-six, funnily enough, just happens to be the age Diana was when she died.

To cynics, it appears Salzman has built a brilliant career around gazing at her navel simply in order to boost her own profile and make a lot of money from books with snazzy titles like Next: The Flow of the Future.

But unlike some social forecasters, she is refreshingly honest about her job.

In fact, she insists, trend-spotting has more in common with trainspotting than tarot-reading. Only 10 per cent of her time is spent gazing into crystal balls, she maintains. The rest is either spent on planes, or absorbing vast amounts of data.

The bottom line, she notes, is that lots of companies rely on people like herself to prevent them launching unwanted products into ungrateful markets.

"The spin the press puts on it has absolutely nothing to do with what I do all day long," she sighs. "I'm just a very well trained market researcher. It is actually the most sophisticated kind of commercial sociology in the world."

Her latest project, for example, is intended to help airlines strengthen their global brands. She has a huge stack of papers to analyse, which are basically reports from Y&R's offices around the world, identifying the characteristics of their own country's "global citizens".

Another recent project is a useful insight into how the company conducts its research. The project attempted to identify what personal traits are most admired around the world. It concluded that honesty is indeed the best international policy.

Interestingly, Y&R's New Zealand and Australian offices rated honesty behind mateship in this part of the world. Humour, "having a go", and resourcefulness were the other traits mentioned.

According to the project, the most admired New Zealanders include actors Lucy Lawless, Sam Neill and Temuera Morrison, models Kylie Bax and Rachel Hunter, film-makers Jane Campion and Lee Tamahori, designers Karen Walker and Liz Findlay, singers Neil Finn and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and America's Cup skipper Russell Coutts.

Although it is somewhat disturbing that Ed Hillary and Sean Fitzpatrick are not mentioned, it is not too bad a list - at least if you're on the light side of 40.

It also goes without saying that predicting the future is a thankless task. When the gurus get it right, the public dismisses their forecasts as self-evident. When they get it wrong, they are never allowed to forget it.

And Salzman has sometimes got it very wrong indeed. Like the time she was invited on American tv show Nightline to talk about the Michael Jackson child abuse controversy and whether he was likely to be dumped by Pepsi.

The days of celebrity endorsements were definitely numbered, she suggested. But she couldn't help adding that at least the country could still hold up OJ Simpson as a genuine hero.

"Six weeks later he went off in his f@#$! Bronco and I looked like an imbecile," she laughs. "It still runs on tv blooper shows."

She admits to being wrong about the success of WebTV (people do watch it), and the price of computers (they have sunk below the $1000 barrier in the US). She also admits that the finer details of technology are not her forte.

Indeed, techno-buffs were less than impressed when Salzman appeared on the Holmes show last year, and warned that the humble hairdrier was one of several appliances that might not survive the Y2K bug. Her response? "It's like arguing about the curtains on the Titanic. The point is we don't know what's going to work and what isn't."

Certainly, no-one could accuse her of soothing fears over the change to the new millennium. Nor is she likely to win the Nobel Prize for her contributions to world peace.

One of her latest theories is that a "fourth world" is emerging, which she defines as the countries that the technological revolution has completely passed by. "They don't have any ties to the other three worlds and that's really frightening because those are the people who have nothing left to lose."

The new millennium will be marked by increasing terrorism, it seems. Maybe that's how we can market New Zealand: the country that terrorists (almost) forgot. You read it here first.