Mary Meehan

2025 Cute/Paste Publication Feature

As a cultural scientist and trend forecaster, Mary Meehan ’77 believes the future may be looking up—to the stars, at least. “If you go to the NASA site, you can see all of these amazing new pictures of the galaxy. There’s so much interest in star gazing in the night sky and finding these dark sky locations on the map,“ she says. “Not since the 1960s and JFK’s famous speech has there been this kind of emphasis on space, which I think will be coming more and more into our lives.”

Over the last thirty years, Fortune 500 companies have come to depend on Meehan’s insights about what the future holds and why. As a cofounder of Iconoculture, the pioneering, Minneapolis-based, consumer-research company, and current CEO of Panoramix Global, Meehan helps brands as big as Walmart, PepsiCo, General Mills, and J.P. Morgan understand major moves in the marketplace—from the way we’re reinventing what it means to age, to why we’re all suddenly so in love with our pets. A big believer in big data, including Metametrix, a cloud-based, cultural analytic tool she also cofounded, Meehan pays close attention to the cultural zeitgeist and her own finely tuned gut.

“You have to have the kind of brain where you can connect the dots and say, ‘This is going to happen because all of these other things are happening.’ It’s something that you have to be able to sense or feel, and it’s why a lot of people don’t believe in trends,” she says. “It’s really difficult to measure them until after the fact, and then you’ve missed it.”

Even so, Meehan admits her own career path would have been hard to see coming. As a graphic design student at MCAD, she successfully petitioned the administration to launch a degree in theater design, and spent her free time creating costumes for the Guthrie and other local theaters. The next step was Broadway, but she hesitated: “I could see that being a seamstress in New York City was going to be a hard life.”

Instead, she was hired at Dayton’s during the cultural height of the department store, where she was charged with starting a new product development division. “I had no idea what it was supposed to be,” she says, “but I had to figure out what would make customers choose our store.” Her answer? Santa Bear, a stuffed animal that went on to become a holiday must-have for generations of Midwest shoppers. That early success earned Meehan plenty of visibility, but when she left to launch her own business, it took a long time for the phone to ring. “When you no longer have a big organization behind you and no one is returning your calls, it becomes a real test of who you are and how talented you are,” she says. “I’ve heard that per capita, MCAD produces more entrepreneurs than the Carlson School of Management, and I’m sure it’s true. In the arts you’re taught to have a high tolerance for risk and uncertainty, which is a powerful thing. You learn how to make many, many mistakes.”

With no plans to retire, Meehan is now a frequent contributor to Forbes and Fast Company, analyzing everything from what Super Bowl ads can tell us about the American mood, to challenging the way both political parties poll their voters: “The problem is they’re designing their surveys by starting at the end, when they should be starting with what’s driving people right now.”

While she admits that imagining what’s next can be worrisome, history has taught her to keep looking forward to the future: “I have great faith in humanity, and I’m an optimist by nature, and that helps me feel more confident that things will come together.”