(FORTUNE Magazine) – BEEN WATCHING much prime-time TV lately? Have you noticed what has happened to commercials? Suddenly all those highly polished, career-obsessed men and women, who through most of the Eighties worked hard, played hard, and seemed bent on raising self-absorption to an art, are disappearing. In their place Adland is giving us a picture of American life straight out of W. C. Fields's worst nightmare: adorable kiddies, cuddly puppy dogs, and sentiment galore.

Take Kellogg's new Raisin Bran commercials. A 30-ish mother and her two small children are eating the stuff in their kitchen when the phone rings. It's dad, away on a business trip, also eating Raisin Bran in his hotel room. ''I just thought we could have breakfast together,'' he says. Then an avuncular voice-over intones cozily, ''The American family is alive and well. And eating Kellogg's Raisin Bran.'' The spot ends with the slogan, ''Health food for the American family.'' WARNING: Repeated exposure to this commercial and its ilk may induce an overwhelming urge to groan, ''Oh, puh-leeze.'' If it sometimes seems they've banned saccharine from the products and coated the ads with it instead, be assured that this is no illusion: Hammering on the heartstrings will be the predominant theme in consumer marketing for the 1990s. That's because in the next decade the largest, best-educated, and most affluent bunch of consumers in history -- the generation born between 1945 and 1965 -- will turn 35, 40, even (gasp!) 50. Geoffrey Greene of the research firm Data Resources points out that in 1980, 42% of U.S. disposable income belonged to household heads between 35 and 54 years old; in 1989 that percentage rose to 47%, and in 2000 it will reach 55%. While real household income will most likely increase for all Americans during the Nineties, that huge 35 to 54 crowd will see their peak earning years. ''So the number of affluent consumers will grow,'' notes Greene, ''and many of them will be in the most intensely home-focused stage of the life cycle, settling down, raising children. For marketers in the Nineties, home will be where the action is.'' Certainly marketers must beware of overlooking a remarkably vigorous, diverse, and well-to-do group -- consumers over 50. Barbara Feigin of Grey Advertising's Strategic Services says, ''They feel advertisers are ignoring them.'' Likewise, the baby-bust generation, that relatively small cohort now age 18 to 25, will be in such demand in the labor force that they will enjoy considerable purchasing power. The best marketing strategies will touch every point in the demographic spectrum. But as always, the baby-boomers will be so numerous that they will strongly influence the tastes and mores of everyone else. How best to pitch products and services to well-off homebodies in the Nineties? Smart marketers will have to address, in varying degrees, five fundamental issues: time, quality, health, the environment, and home.

-- TIME. ''Time will be the currency of the Nineties,'' says Feigin of Grey Advertising. Reason: the ubiquity of the two-career family. Convenience will be paramount, particularly in foods, and woe to the purveyor of comestibles whose product can't be quickly popped from freezer or fridge to microwave and ready to eat in a flash. Fresh, ready-made meals will be available in most big grocery stores, and ever more restaurants will deliver elaborate feasts to your doorstep: Just wait till the tots are asleep, add candles and wine, and serve. Nobody will want to waste time standing in the checkout line, so supermarkets are being designed to make shopping quicker. A&P, ShopRite, and Publix will be experimenting with do-it-yourself automated checkouts. Kroger tested an automated system that let shoppers check themselves out by running their purchases through an electronic scanner and then paying the computer with a special cash card. ''The technology worked fine,'' says a Kroger official, ''but we found that people really missed seeing a human face at the checkout counter.'' Kroger is therefore looking at different ways to speed things up. Each department -- floral, bakery, ready-made meals, and so on -- has its own express checkout. A customer who just wants to run in and grab something for dessert doesn't have to get anywhere near the shopper who is laying in a month's supply of vittles and paying with an out-of-state check. The disappearance of mom as an all-day unpaid laborer also means that kids, especially teenagers, are making more grown-up purchasing decisions than ever before. ''If you were a kid 20 years ago, chances are your mom wouldn't let you anywhere near the washing machine,'' says Feigin. ''Now mothers are so pressed for time, they're hoping the children will do their own laundry. And kids have a say in choosing almost every household item, whether it's a box of detergent or a new VCR. They are a kind of hidden force in the marketplace.'' Margaret Regan, a consultant with Towers Perrin Foster & Crosby, has done research on flexible-benefit plans for corporate clients and found that what employees say they really want is not better dental coverage or more vacation time, but somebody to run ordinary errands to places like the post office and the bank. ''In the Nineties there will be a huge market for quotidian services,'' says Regan. ''Business has to rise to the challenge.'' The market for care of the elderly will grow apace. A 1987 study by the American Association of Retired Persons showed that seven million U.S. households included someone personally taking care of an older relative and that 55% of those caregivers also held jobs. As the population ages, the time crunch will become more widespread and acute. Notes Regan: ''The grown daughter, who traditionally has cared for her aging parents, is in the work force now. People are going to need innovative, compassionate solutions, and with time generally scarcer than money, they'll be willing to pay for them.''

-- QUALITY. With time at a premium and errands a problem, people balk at buying anything that will need much servicing or repair. But demands for quality go beyond merely wanting things to work right. Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, the consumer research firm, has discovered what senior vice president Susan Hayward calls ''a major shift in consumer values'' that emerged in the late Eighties and seems likely to continue through the next ten years. ''The Eighties were intensely competitive. Everybody wanted to be a winner.'' As early as 1986, however, Yankelovich researchers began to notice a difference. Says Hayward: ''Each consumer began to question whether consumption was really the road to happiness.'' Of course, people aren't about to stop buying things. But instead of more and glitzier, they will want fewer and more durable. Thus, the latest trend is nontrendiness, which Yankelovich has dubbed neotraditionalism. Status, until lately defined as grabbing all the glittering prizes, now means, Hayward says, ''what makes sense for me.'' If the Eighties were a Ferrari Testarossa, the Nineties will be something else entirely -- perhaps a Jeep Cherokee, perhaps a Volvo station wagon.

-- HEALTH. We won't soon see the end of oat bran mania. Consumers are so preoccupied with health that in a survey of shoppers, over half said a new product should be allowed on supermarket shelves only if it contained little cholesterol, little fat, and few calories. Beverage Marketing Corp., a New York firm that predicts what people will drink, expects that the fastest- growing beverage category in the Nineties will continue to be bottled water. As a selling point, health is often connected with home. Kellogg's ''Health food for the American family'' makes that link tidily and will be widely imitated. Some home-and-health pairings are a bit puzzling. Campbell's Home Style tomato soup, aimed at higher-income consumers, contains massive amounts of vitamin C, which you probably don't recall grandma stirring into the pot. The fitness fanaticism of the Eighties -- a trend that at times showed all the zeal and kindly tolerance of a secular Spanish Inquisition -- will mellow considerably. It will be all right to soften a bit around the edges. The boom in exercise equipment is over, and fewer ads will feature sweaty amateur athletes pushing themselves to the edge of collapse. Hayward of Yankelovich says, ''The baby-boomers will fight the physical aging process as long as they can, which is great news for cosmetics companies. But once they finally give up, aging will become chic. Gray hair will be fashionable.'' Hayward notes that the women's clothing industry has already suffered a few rude shocks, including the dismal failure of the reintroduced miniskirt, from Woodstock- generation customers who are feeling their age.

-- ENVIRONMENT. Remember Earth Day? Well, its 20th anniversary -- April 22, 1990 -- will get heavy worldwide attention, and many consumer markets experts say the Nineties will be the Earth Decade. A Gallup poll reveals that 76% of Americans think of themselves as ''environmentalists,'' and businesses of all kinds are responding. Predicts Joel Makower, a syndicated columnist and co- author of a forthcoming book called The Green Consumer: ''In the Nineties terms like 'environment-friendly' will come to be as widely used, overused, and abused as 'natural' and 'light' have been in the Eighties.'' Environment fervor will give rise to whole new industries. One of these, still in its infancy but growing fast, is the low-environmental-impac t travel business, sometimes called ecotourism. The idea is to gain an appreciation of undeveloped areas, which are disappearing fast, without harming them. A popular journey offered by Breakaway Adventure Travel of Cambridge, Massachusetts, takes small groups of tourists deep into the Amazonian rain forest, where they live for six days with indigenous tribespeople -- an experience, Breakaway's brochure notes, ''previously only available to hard- core explorers, anthropologists, and missionaries.'' The cost: $1,595 per person, not including air fare to Caracas. Wildland Journeys, a Seattle ecotourism enterprise growing 20% a year, runs some trips that are even more redolent of the Peace Corps than Breakaway's are, including one that takes groups of 14 adventurers on two-week treks to Peru (at about $1,900 a head, air fare included) to clean up the hiking trails around the ruins at Machu Picchu. The Audubon Society, which offers trips to all parts of the world (latest destinations include Alaska, Antarctica, Indonesia, and Scandinavia), encourages sightseers to abide by a seven-point code of ethics: no littering, no bothering the animals, no snickering at local folkways, and so on. Audubon travel manager Margaret Mullaly says, ''People want to feel assured, especially in fragile areas, that they won't be hurting the environment.'' Nearly 1,000 travelers signed on for Audubon trips in 1989, twice as many as in 1988. The ecotourism business isn't only about conservation. Kurt Kutay, a co- founder of Wildland Journeys, says most of his customers are mainly after adventure. Arnold Brown, who ponders the future for the New York consulting firm Weiner Edrich Brown, believes the Nineties will see a marked increase in consumers' appetite for thrills. ''As people become more financially secure, they tend to look around for a bit of excitement,'' he says, ''and let's face it, with all the fear of AIDS and so on, one major source of excitement has been curtailed.'' By his reckoning, rock-climbing expeditions and white-water rafting trips are nudging aside love affairs as the pulse quickeners of the future. This is happy news for marketers of such items as backpacks, life jackets, and Swiss army knives, but the rest of us may be excused a little wistfulness.

-- HOME. In a more domesticated society, many technological innovations in the Nineties will make staying home more fun. So-called smart television (FORTUNE, November 20) will read the TV listings and record programs you might want to watch later -- editing out the commercials -- while also scanning databases for information of interest, answering the telephone, playing compact discs, and running other appliances around the house. This innovation will be so expensive at first that demand may be slow off the mark. Not to worry: Greene at Data Resources predicts that home entertainment will be ''the single strongest growth market of the Nineties'' and that competition will drive prices down in a hurry. Some of the most salutary advances of this home-centered decade will be in the design and construction of houses. Many homes will soon do more. Electronic and fiber-optic technology will bring sophisticated monitoring systems -- lighting controls and motion detectors, for example -- plus cable TV in most rooms and sensor-activated fire sprinklers similar to the kind now found only in stores and office buildings. The next few years will also bring innovations aimed at making new housing more affordable. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California are among those studying ways to cut costs. Much of the cost of construction labor, for example, could be eliminated by building components of a house -- say, entire rooms with doors and windows installed -- in factories, and then hauling the components to the construction site for final assembly. Such techniques have been widely discussed for decades, but until now most of the progress has been outside the U.S. ''The Europeans do a lot of component-housing manufacture, which is very cost-effective, and the U.S. will be moving in that direction,'' says Berkeley researcher Brandt Andersson. ''We haven't changed the way we build houses in centuries. It's time for a fresh look.'' At least one developer has begun applying such thinking to the problem of how to house the elderly. Coastal Colony Corp. of Manheim, Pennsylvania, sells factory-built cottages complete with carpeting, appliances, and whatever roofing and siding the customer chooses. They are intended primarily for families with an elderly relative who wants to live nearby without losing too much independence. Coastal Colony will install a cottage in a family's backyard, and if the family moves, the cottage can move too. A two-bedroom unit, installed, costs about $33,000. ''So far we've focused on this as a solution to elderly people's needs,'' says Ed Guion, Coastal Colony's president. ''But because modular housing is easily expandable, it could be great for first-time home buyers too. They could add rooms as their families grow.'' The market for brand-new houses at $33,000 each could be sizable. If this catches on, other homebuilders will have to compete, and home buyers will be the winners. , UNDERLYING all the changes in consumers' concerns, and as important as all of them, will be a markedly changed inner sense. The Nineties will see what consumer-marketing consulting firm FCB/Leber Katz in New York calls ''the end of the myth of Me.'' Narcissism is out, and so is dog-eat-dog ambition. At the same time Americans will seek a sense of moral stability. According to futurist Arnold Brown, ''people are searching for absolute values and a sure grasp of right and wrong.'' Brown sees ''a return to the eternal verities,'' a groundswell of longing for some permanent, transcendent set of values. Consider that M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled, a book billed as offering ''spiritual inspiration,'' has been on the New York Times best-seller list for an astonishing 324 weeks. Brown foresees a renewal of interest in religion. You might well wonder how marketers of consumer goods can contrive to capitalize on the hope that God is not dead. But consider Kleenex tissues' new slogan: ''Kleenex says Bless You.'' Anyone who doubts the trend need only peek into any church in midtown Manhattan -- former hotbed of Eighties materialism -- on a Sunday morning. The pews and choir lofts are filling up with persons bearing a suspicious resemblance to investment bankers and other fast-track types, often with babies in tow. The Nineties will be a far less cynical decade than the Eighties. Yes, we will still care what things cost. But we will seek to value only those things -- family, community, earth, faith -- that will endure.