Cool like Dat
Saturday, November 17, 2007 at 10:18PM Guest blogger, Kalen Jericho
Are you a hunter, the hunted, or cool enough to be both?
Coolhunting . . . or as defined by reference.com: A term coined in the early 1990s referring to a new breed of marketing professionals, called coolhunters. It is their job to make observations and predictions in changes of new or existing cultural trends.
It does not mean 'trend analyst', or 'interview group coordinator' or even 'marketing guru'.
It means that you eat, sleep and breathe cool, like Josh Rubin, the Editor in Chief of coolhunting.com, the foremost online forum for art, design, fashion and culture. If you do a google news search for 'coolhunting', 46 of the 50 articles that appear, are from this site. And 1 of the other 4 articles references it.
It means you create cool, like the fashion forward kids from Manhattan's lower east side that Malcolm Gladwell mentions in his bestselling book, "The Tipping Point". These creative creators brought about the resurgence of hushpuppies; turning a company on the verge of bankruptcy into an industry leader in a matter of months. (If you don't know what hushpuppies are, brush up on your 'cool' and google it.)
It means you can commune cool, like the founders of Xindc, a genuinely popular monthly event in Washington, DC. X = (Electronica + Projections + Art + Fashion + Performance) + YOU. I couldn't say it better myself. But I can say the ambiance is cool because the people are unique, design oriented, graphic, and creative. It's a perfect recipe for experiencing all the elements of 'cool'.
What's the thread through these examples . . . and it's not . . . 'cool'. It's entrepreneurial. It's creating something, that is bigger than the sum of its parts. It doesn't matter if you're the hunted or the hunter as long as you're cool enough to see the connection between what's cool to you and culture, at large. If you can hunt down what's cool to you and you have the foresight to create something that other people can relate to; people will hunt you down so they can be cool too. We cool?
Reader Comments (1)
Coolhunters are definitely one of those phenomena. Entrepreneurs benefit from their exposure to coolhunters....and the coolhunters themselves have a talent that's worth a lot to their organizations.
We all have the ability to play many roles; this ability will, in fact, be essential to business success in the Networked World. Every marketer these days should be prepared to don a coolhunting hat from time to time.
The post brings to mind another role that will become hugely significant in the Networked World: Community builder. The role and the skills required for it, are fairly self-evident. A friend of mine who's helping develop the branding for a big telecomm recently called me from Chicago and asked, "What can we do to build an online community?"
I told him he was asking the wrong question. What you should be asking, I said, is WHO should build our online community?
Thank you for the post.