The X/Y factor

Cool-hunters became the rage after Malcolm Gladwell popularized the phenomenon in his 1997 New Yorker article, but since then that kind of golden gut approach has fallen out of favor to be replaced by the statisticians of hip. For Buckingham, that means some 14,000 paid correspondents from all over the country, divided up into three major groups: mainstreamers (10,000 strong), insiders (250 DJs, network execs and stylists) and trendsetters (3,500 people with a feel for the cutting edge). Almost every one of her competitors, outfits like Look-Look and the Zandl Group, boasts of a vast network of informers, whose predilections are carefully categorized and summarized and sold to corporate America.

Although Buckingham's research is fascinating, it's hard not to feel, sitting in Trend School with a crew of marketers, that one's sitting inside the netherworld of a pop culture sausage factory. Yet as Tristian Coopersmith, one of Buckingham's acolytes, explains during her presentation, Generation Y "likes advertising. They just don't like bad advertising."

"Market research and marketing in general does a lot to actually 'create' the trends that it pretends to discover and absorb," says William Mazzarella, an anthropology professor at University of Chicago who studies consumerism. "Marketing helps to organize more or less embryonic and fluid trends, giving them a kind of fixity and firmness of outline -- in the shape of branded meanings -- that they would otherwise not have."

Buckingham, who moved from New York to L.A. four years ago, with her husband, a leadership consultant, and her two children, wears her influence lightly, as befits someone who puckishly named her forecasting manual the Cassandra Report, after Troy's soothsayer who told the future but no one would listen.

"I do think there is a lot of anxiety out there," she says about this era of flux. "As a people, we're anxious. As marketers, we're anxious. People are unpredictable. They're not watching TV the way they used to watch. They're not buying the way they used to buy. So many older models are changing." Buckingham can have the soothing manner of a kindly nursery school teacher, and she frames what her company does as: "Let us get to know them [the consumers] more deeply so you're less anxious."