Salzman started her career with a top-flight academic education under her belt—courtesy of Brown University and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—along with a nose for the next thing. She formed her own youth marketing consultancy, BKG Youth, and from that landed a job at the legendary Chiat\Day, where charismatic co-founder Jay Chiat was himself no slouch at intuiting change.

Wiggers: With a background in journalism and sociology, Salzman recognized in 1992 that “black is where it's at” and predicted that white suburban kids would adopt black music, styles and icons as never before. She alerted her marketing clients to these white wanna-bes and helped them decode the signs and encode the right messages. The term for these white kids was itself a potent mix (wigger from “white nigger”), and Salzman's media savvy helped her get the right people buzzing about the trend. Within months, she was introducing it to mainstream America on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The rest is Eminem and history.

America Online: Salzman is a self-confessed technical klutz. But in the early-mid '90s, at a time when the Internet was not yet a part of consumer life and many corporations dismissed it as irrelevant, America Online was a client. It was struggling to get Americans to see what the Internet could be, and Salzman immediately recognized before anyone else that the AOL portal was just not another technological invention, but a truly new medium for interaction and interconnection. As she put it, “I see online, just for example, as my bridge to parallel and multiple universes. After a lengthy cyber-chat, I do feel that I have 'talked' with a friend.”

But Salzman didn't just chat with friends online, she pioneered online focus groups. And she didn't just run the groups from a corporate office: she ran them from her laptop, flopped out on her bed—with a reporter looking on in amazement. It took ahead-of-the-curve trendspotting talent to conduct market research via the Internet well over a decade ago. And it took a great nose for news to dramatize the AOL trend and get the media buzzing.

“With some trends, like metrosexuals, the evidence is already out there and plain to see for anyone who's alerted to it,” says Salzman. “The Internet and America Online was different. It was a change that was small at the time but one that I saw as having huge potential to change absolutely everything—brands, marketing, business, social interactions. So to get people buzzing about it, I had to find a way of dramatizing it.”

Metrosexuals: In 2002, Salzman was leading a team working on a beer account when some quirky data started popping out of the market research. It tied in with things she had noticed on the street and in the media and reminded her of something she had read. Then she found a Salon piece by British journalist Mark Simpson in which he revisited the term “metrosexual,” which he had coined in 1994.

The data and her 2003 take on the metrosexual phenomenon didn't align entirely with Simpson's original term, but the word seemed to sum up the trend she was seeing. So she started creating buzz around the idea of “metrosexual” men, and a term that had languished almost unnoticed for a decade took on a life of its own and quickly spread around the world.

One reason the trend had such “buzzability” was that it was easy for people to grasp after hearing just a short descriptor, such as “straight men who are just gay enough.” Media coverage of the term and the concept was so widespread that even U.S. presidential contenders used it; “metrosexual” has now entered everyday speech.

The development of the metrosexual phenomenon is a fascinating case study in the life of a trend. It started with Simpson, as an insight referring to a specific environment and a closed community, then lay dormant as aspects of the phenomenon gradually spread into mainstream culture. Salzman then spotted the trend in its new form and got the media buzzing about it. While she has moved on to other trends, metrosexual continues its life, gradually morphing over time.