NICHE NATION

If you work with a communications firm, you probably think of yourself as something of a trendmaster – always alert to and stalking market movement and consumer desire.

I remember when I became aware last year of the mainstreaming of jeep-style army caps. One of the women in my office was sporting the thing -- wearing it all day long.

There were probably, oh, about a million first-adopters already parading around in the style capitals of the universe with the wide-side hats before I finally figured out something was up.

Mark Penn, whose day job is running PR goliath Burson-Marsteller as CEO – when he is not advising Hillary Clinton – does a better job , I think. Penn is a true trendmaster. His expertise is not based on hanging out the local mall like the rest of us, but on that truly weird science of polling. WPP owns Burson and bought up Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates six years ago.

If you are about to be thrown out of your local Starbucks as an ogler, do your lurking the easy way: Check out pollster Penn’s new book, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, from Twelve Books. Coauthor is E. Kinney Zalesne, a brilliant refugee from the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign and former counsel to Janet Reno. She is a continuing colleague of Penn’s at PSB.

If there were a pollster hall of fame, Penn would be in it. It was he who deployed Hillary’s husband after those “soccer moms.” The rest is re-election history. Among the book’s new finds that I love – and he and Zalesne identify more than 70 in the book –are the philo-Semites and Protestant Latinos.

The philo-Semites are goyim who want to date and marry Jewish men and women. Not sure how Hilary will turn that to her favor unless she dumps Bill for a handsome rabbi.

The understanding that Penn and Zalesne show about Protestant Latinos may prove more useful in restoring the Clinton dynasty to office. The authors argue that this group of ten million went mostly for George Bush in the 2004 election and was the most significant factor in his victory.

Keep an eye on Hillary’s outreach to this group; it may not succeed if the Republicans can find a properly pious and evangelistic candidate. (The Catholic Hispanics – 70-plus percent of the total Hispanic population in the U.S. – mostly stayed in the Democratic fold.)

The Internet, which is rapidly becoming the principal communications highway for all Americans, is the big enabler of all these small trend-forward groups – it’s easy on-line to find your co-believers for event he tiniest unorthodox undertaking – whether it is philo-Semites looking for love and scripture, or extreme commuters who travel great distances and create markets in in-car entertainment and lobby against high fuel taxes.

Small was beautiful. Now it’s powerful too, in the marketplace and in the public forum.

The Economist, reviewing Microtrends in its September 22 issue, says it best: “America is no longer a melting pot. It is becoming a nation of niches.”