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Malcolm Gladwell, “The Coolhunt” (HCC Reader, pp. 119-131). 1. What is coolhunting? (p. 119). Coolhunting is a form of market research that involves scouting out new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing.
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1. What is coolhunting? (p. 119) • Coolhunting is a form of market research that involves scouting out new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing.
2. What is the role of the “world of the street” in coolhunting? (p. 120) • Coolhunters are interested in what urban youth groups, including minority groups, are wearing, listening to, etc. Skateboarding, snowboarding, and hip hop are some of the groups observed by cool hunters. What people are wearing on urban streets in major cities (Tokyo, LA, New York, etc.) is also the object of observation.
3. Why did coolhunting make the job of sneaker designers and marketers harder rather than easier? (p. 120) • Scouting out new trends sped up the design cycle.
4. Why can’t Malcolm Gladwell write an “encyclopedia of cool”? (p. 121) • Coolhunting, like cool, is not systematic. It is spontaneous, observational, and always changing.
5. According to Malcolm Gladwell, how did Tommy Hilfiger become cool? (p. 121) • Possibly because he had a multi-ethnic team of young people from different parts of New York and the world working for him. Or, maybe it was just the endorsement by hip-hop auteur Grand Puba.
6. What is diffusion research? What do hybrid seed corn and Hush Puppy shoes have in common? (p. 123-5) • Diffusion research is the study of trends. • Hybrid seed corn and Hush Puppies both spread in stages, by word of mouth.
7. Why is cool something that companies and marketers can’t control? (p. 125) • “Cool” is a question of choices made by a select group of young people, who might be powerful taste makers but are otherwise often pretty disenfranchised (by virtue of youth, race, and money). Companies can “intervene in the cool cycle” by scouting out a trend and marketing it, but they can’t actually create cool (according to MG at least).
8. What are some of the different ways that cool hunters in the 1990s did research? (pp. 127-8) • Surveys distributed to very specific groups and analyzed geographically and demographically with “uncool” control groups (yeah, that would be me); larger, vaguer panels of kids; more “impressionistic” tools including video cameras. Since Gladwell wrote his piece, “design ethnography” has become a major research method among fashion marketers – and a great second career path for anthropology majors.
9. What are the three rules of cool? • Cool can’t be observed accurately, because as soon as you call something cool, it starts losing its coolness. • Cool can’t be manufactured, only observed. • You have to be cool to recognize cool.
10. Malcolm Gladwell published his essay “The Coolhunt” in 1997. How do you think coolhunting has changed in the last 12 years? • The internet is the main force that has changed coolhunting. Sites produced through user-generated content (like Threadless.com) decentralize coolhunting: the artists submitting to these sites are helping to identify and generate as well as market and purchase “cool.” Rating systems and numbers of hits are great ways for marketers to collect trend information without having to leave their office cubicles. Many blogs are essentially cool-hunting organs, with the authors scanning their areas of interest for the latest thing and then publicizing it.
