Cool Hunting

Cool hunting is the process marketers go through to discover what is cool to teenagers. Underground marketers (culture spies), that are young, former trend setting cool kids themselves, search for a certain kind of personality or social player within a group of teenagers that holds influence over other in the group. These are the "early adopters" of trends. These cool kids are trusted by their peers to determine what is and isn't cool, thus, the cultural spies hunt these kids out.

Cool hunting is used as a marketing tool with teenagers by:

• The cultural spies reporting their field research to marketing companies.
• The marketing companies then use the information to create ads and products to influence what teens buy.

What I found most interesting was that the minute things are cool, they are almost immediately uncool:

• The industry that kills what it finds.
• Cultural spies are finding and destroying coolness all at the same time.

What's funny, is that I am guilty of the same stubbornness that they talk about teenagers having. If something was cool, I didn't want any part of it.