By MARK PENN with E. KINNEY ZALESNE
From The Wall Street Journal Microtrends Column
With all the stimulus ready to go into more broadband, bigger tax cuts and infrastructure, some of America’s most expensive societal investments are also on the decline and in need of a bailout — getting married.
Marriage in America is on the rocks. People […]

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By MARK PENN with E. KINNEY ZALESNE
From The Wall Street Journal Microtrends Column
With so much attention on psychological marketing these days — finding new ways to tap into people’s heads — perhaps the single most neglected trend out there is the move towards more hard-nosed information-based shopping and purchasing.
While elites were busy shoveling money into […]

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By MARK PENN with E. KINNEY ZALESNE
From The Wall Street Journal Microtrends Column
Just as more people in China are working for firms that are privately owned, more workers in America are waking up to find themselves working for companies that are — at least for now — state-owned.
This new class of workers and executives in […]

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By MARK PENN with E. KINNEY ZALESNE
From The Wall Street Journal Microtrends Column
For most of this century, con men and hucksters preyed on the uneducated and the elderly who couldn’t read the fine print. Some still are.But now we learn that the real mother lode for con artists is not composed of uninformed dowagers who […]

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We recently started a regular Microtrends column in The Wall Street Journal online. Here’s the one from December 10. 2008.
The Mattress Stuffers
December 10th, 2008
By MARK PENN with E. KINNEY ZALESNE
From The Wall Street Journal Microtrends Column

As the financial crisis swept across the nation these past few months, one of the first microtrend groups to emerge […]

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By E. KINNEY ZALESNE
Are you starting to see Microtrends everywhere you look?
A few weeks ago, TIME Magazine profiled atheists who’ve started a Sunday School — to pass their atheist orientation on to their kids. In an era of “pervasive religiosity,” as we talked about in the book, atheists are a counter-intuitive force – a small […]

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