Overview

A wholly new force is driving human behavior today, and it's turning the world as we know it upside down and inside out. Human behavior is now being driven by a new survival instinct -- a new primal desire -- that is invisibly but unstoppably reshaping the world, from the most intimate details of our private lives to the dynamics of the global marketplace. The New Culture of Desire reveals and chronicles this present and future brave new world -- the beginning of Human History Part II. According to futurist Melinda Davis, it is evolving right under our noses, and we need to adapt now to survive -- and to thrive. Described variously as ""a secret weapon of the Fortune 100"" and a ""hired-gun visionary,"" Davis divulges the startling conclusions and once confidential details of The Human Desire Project, a six-year, multidisciplinary study to investigate what makes human beings want what they want and do what they do. Originally initiated as a landmark study for big business (Davis's client ranks include distinguished companies such as AT&T, Merck, Diageo, Procter & Gamble, L'Oréal, Unilever, and Lucent Technologies), The Human Desire Project evolved into an even larger phenomenon with far-reaching implications for all of our lives. In The New Culture of Desire, you learn to leverage for your own good fortune, today -- and into tomorrow -- the same insights and strategies that inform the future plans of some of the most powerful corporate movers and shakers around. Here are just some of the revelations of The New Culture of Desire: - The unconscious formula that we all use to make choices now - Why bliss beats sex, money, and power - The new peak experience: the State of O - The single greatest unmet consumer need - The battle for our interior lives - The five strategies we enlist to satisfy the new primal desire -- and what they mean for your life and your business Harvard-educated and street-smart, Davis examines the telltale signs of our rapidly morphing world with the nose of an MIT/MTV anthropologist and an arsenal of case histories. Quizzes and checklists appear throughout the book to help you diagnose your own desires. New marketing models provide new ways to speak more powerfully to the heart of your customers' true desires. This insider's analysis of the most powerful desire-driven trends of our time provides a strategic guide to the inside of the new millennial mind, to help you understand your own motivations and those of your colleagues, customers, and friends. Here are some of those cultural trends that you need to know about: - Magical Thinking: Looking for the simple, supernatural solution - The Third Sex: Having it all - Yoda-ism: New candidates for a god - Tribe Crashing: The ultimate insiderism - Hot-Blooded Spiritualism: Drumming up the saving graces - Raging Amazonianism: The rise of the butt-kicking babe - Pleasure Healing: Self-indulgence that does you good - P. Q.: The Performance Quotient: Upgrading the human processor A pioneering work that looks into what people want and why, The New Culture of Desire blows traditional future-planning theory and practice sky-high, and replaces it with groundbreaking strategies that really work.

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9781416593058

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Tom Peters I loved Melinda Davis's book. It disoriented me. And if you are not disoriented in 2002, you are not in touch with the profound/scary/wonderful/horrible changes that have engulfed us all....Read. Ponder.

Sherry Turkle<p>director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT<p>At mid-twentieth century, David Riesman argued that Americans had shifted from authentic inner direction to anxious, please-your-neighbor, outer direction. Davis suggests a troublesome turn of the wheel: We've come to the worst of both worlds at the dawn of the new millennium. We are anxiously turned inward -- the self is our central preoccupation -- and we want our relationships as well as our consumer products to help us heal! Arresting and absorbing, The New Culture of Desire provokes self-reflection: Are we really drawn to the marketers who convince us that their products offer corrective emotional experiences?

Author Information

Melinda Davis is the CEO and primary seer of The Next Group, a futurist think tank in New York, and has consulted to multinational corporations, venture capitalists, politicians, and pop culture icons. She is also a fiction writer and winner of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City with her husband, Ealan Wingate.

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