Merchandising “Cool” – The Never-Ending Search
PBS Frontline, in 2001, ran a frankly prophetic documentary on what were then cutting-edge techniques in brand marketing. It’s interesting to note how quickly these trends proliferated until now, nine years later, they seem frightfully commonplace. The transcript can be found here.
The piece begins by remarking that the “teen generation” of 2001, the one to which I belonged, had been the largest and most sought-after generation to date – even larger than the baby boomers. It collectively spent $100 billion dollars per year on itself, and induced its parents to spend an additional $50 billion. It had more disposable cash then ever before, and economic freedom to spend it. And so finding the best way to appeal to that generation became a pressing concern for the Madison Street advertising firms – and a lucrative one.
Early research quickly focused upon that implacable question – What is ‘cool’?How does one become cool? A species known in the marketing business as “Cool Hunters” made its niche to find that answer. As Malcolm Gladwell says in the piece:
“Cool hunting” is structured around, really, a search for a certain kind of personality and a certain kind of player in a given social network. For years and years on Madison Avenue, if you knew where the money was and where the power was and where the big houses were, then you knew what was going to happen next. And cool hunting was all about a kind of revolution that sets that earlier paradigm aside and says, in fact, it has to do with the influence held by those who have the respect and admiration and trust of their friends.
PBS takes us briefly through the life of a corporate spy:
A correspondent is a person who’s been trained by us to be able to find a certain kind of kid, a kid that we call a trendsetter or an early adopter. This is a kid who’s very forward in their thinking, who looks outside their own backyard for inspiration, who is a leader within their own group.These kids are really difficult to find. So what this correspondent does is they go out and they, like, find and identify these trend-setting kids. They interview them. They get them interested in what we do. They send all that stuff in. We look at it. We compile it. We look for trends or themes that are happening through all the information, and that’s the stuff that we put on our Web site.
But there was a problem. The process essentially cannibalizes itself. As it turns out, a big part of being “cool” is having nothing to do with avaricious marketers with an intent to exploit. As soon as a certain trend becomes blatantly marketed, kids move on to the next thing. Trying to pin down “cool” is an infinite game of whack-a-mole, a perpetual cycle.
The piece details how Sprite improbably became the symbol of hip-hop by sponsoring DJs and MC’s to promote their drink. By the way, this is the reason contemporary music is awful:
[Advertising Executive] PINA SCIARRA: Hip-hop for us became the sort vehicle, or the lens, for us to get to teens and talk to them in a credible way. And the way we did that was to develop relationships with artists.
And it worked. Sprite’s sales skyrocketed, and in 2001, when the piece was done, had attained supremacy in the youth market.
The reporter, Douglas Rushkoff, intones chillingly:
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: Is it nostalgic to think that when we were young it was any different, that the thing we called “youth culture” wasn’t something that was just being sold to us, it was something that came from us, an act of expression, not just of consumption? Has that boundary been completely erased?
Today five enormous companies are responsible for selling nearly all of youth culture. These are the true merchants of cool: Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, Disney, Viacom, Universal Vivendi, and AOL/Time Warner.
Those companies own all of the networks. All advertising must go through them. And MTV, one of our primary outlets of branded youth culture, became a virtual laboratory, where the results of thousands of focus groups, undercover fact-finding missions, and interviews got to be tested on real consumers. Viacom, MTV’s parent, happened to be the ‘coolest’ conglomerate when this piece was made, and I have no doubt it still is. After all, they still own Jon Stewart, the White House court jester, who is authentically popular with the 18-24 demographic.
Exploring Viacom’s success, PBS examines how it gained popularity with the male demographic with several case studies, all centered around the idea of a “mook”, an advertising term that translates roughly to “boor”. In males, the “mook” takes its manifest in the lowbrow comedy acts like Howard Stern, Tom Green, the phenomena of professional wrestling, The Man Show and the Jackass franchise. The impulse there is always not to think, not to worry about anything in particular; just embrace your “manhood” – your penchant for slapstick comedy and outrageous statements – and above all, keep buying things.
The female counterpart to the “mook” emphasized overt sexuality, typified by Britney Spears. As the piece remarks of Ms. Spears:
She hit the scene at 16 with “Baby, One More Time,” as a naughty Catholic schoolgirl bursting out of her uniform. When it came time for a spread in Rolling Stone, the 17-year-old self-professed virgin Britney struck the classic nymphet pose. And at the Video Music Awards last year, when Britney finally and famously came out of her clothes, she wasn’t just pleasing eager young boys, she was delivering a powerful missive to girls: Your body is your best asset. Flaunt your sexuality even if you don’t understand it. And that’s the message that matters most because Britney’s most loyal fans are teenage girls.
PBS takes us through several other case studies, and the trend of anti-intellectualism pervades throughout. Through endless focus groups and iterations of the cool chase, our marketers have programmed us to be unthinking, unfeeling, buying machines. It would be easy to dismiss these techniques as rather severe examples of the sort of anti-intellectualism that prevailed around the time President Bush was elected; that they were a small part of an overall scheme to make a purely corporate candidate electable for office. Perhaps, many would argue, President Obama, the university intellectual, repudiated that culture.
However, to those detractors I would offer this last bit of evidence: the lyrics to a song entitled “Blah Blah Blah” by our newest musical sensation, 22-year-old “Ke$ha”, who has just released a best-selling record, one year into Obama’s presidency.
Coming out your mouth with your blah blah blah
Just zip your lips like a padlock
And meet me at the back with the jack and the jukebox
I don’t really care where you live at
Just turn around boy and let me hit that
Don’t be a little bitch with your chit chat
Just show me where your dick’s atMusic’s up
Listen hot stuff
I’m in love
With this song
So just hush
Baby shut up
Heard enoughStop ta-ta-talking that
Blah blah blah
Think you’ll be getting this
Nah nah nah
Not in the back of my
Car-ar-ar
If you keep talking that
Blah blah blah blah blahBoy come on get your rocks off
Come put a little love in my glove box
I wanna dance with no pants on
Meet me in the back with the jack and the jukebox
So cut to the chase kid
‘Cause I know you don’t care what my middle name is
I wanna be naked
But your wasted
For anyone who would like to know how these lyrics came to be, and still wonders how the machinery of political suppression is exercised, I highly recommend PBS Frontline’s investigation.
Update: You can watch the documentary online here.
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props to calling Jon Stewart the White House court jester – well said, it’s very true.
I’ve said it before, we need anti-propaganda classes starting in kindergarten, going on until the PhD level to make people aware of the extent to which they (and to a lesser extent, we) have been deceived.
And damn, are those lyrics dehumanizing or what? Although girls with that attitude do serve a valuable purpose in society 😛
Aditya
March 21, 2010 at 3:16 pm