The Popcorn Report

Marketing consultant Popcorn is in the business of spotting commercially significant social trends to offer appropriate product and policy recommendations to blue-chip clients like AT & T, IBM and Coca-Cola (she told the latter that New Coke wouldn't work). Here she organizes 17 years of brainstorming in quick and easy takes, concluding with the projection of a totally altered American affluence for the ' 90s. Under the business name of BrainReserve and backed up by such consultants as adman Jerry Della Femina, editor Grace Mirabella and farmer Frank Perdue, Popcorn and staff have developed refreshingly original concepts and a language of their own: Down-Aging, Egonomics. Popcorn's predictions include electronic shopping from home by ``cocooned'' shoppers and a children's crusade to force industry and government to restore the environment. ``Anticipating a new reality is the beginning of the process of creating it,'' writes the ever upbeat Popcorn, whose book is a great place to start that process. Fortune Book Club main selection; BOMC and QPB alternates. (Sept.)