Coolness

What is cool? How does one define it? You really can’t define it (like the judicial definition of obscenity: I can’t describe it but I know it when I see it). Those with it know it when they see it. Still, Cool is king in America and American cultural values (right up there with youthful, fitness, popular, and sexy) Why does it matter?

Cool comes from a select few early adopters, market mavens, who are opinion leaders that others tend to follow. Often the first signs of a fad come from the urban ghetto and spreads to the ‘burbs. Another source is California, known as the bellweather state for coolness; more fads get started there than anywhere else in the nation. Wherever it comes from, whatever it is, whenever it shows its new faces, it bubbles up and the rest of the country’s fashion-sensitive youth (and these days the world’s as well) pay attention and attempt to emulate coolness by following suit.

Marketers known as “coolhunters” are paid big bucks to identify, specify, and market whatever is cool at the moment. They do this by interviewing the trendsetters, by observing what they are doing, wearing, where they are going, what they are listening to. Over the years the coolhunters have had to work hard to be trusted and accepted by those market mavens upon whose likes and dislikes the rest of the world awaits. These coolhunters work by intutition and base their guesses on their experience and gut. They can only stay coolhunters so long, they, like the rest of us, age, and kids, to whom cool is everything, tend to trust those their same age group ( a forty-something coolhunter is a rarity—a man-child? A Peter Pan who never grew up)

Marketers pay coolhunters to provide them with the earliest signs of fads and coolness so they can get on the bandwagon early. Too late and they might as well forget it as they would end up with tons of unsold merchandise. Too early and it is not yet cool and the same end result. In coolness, timing is everything.

Cool is transient. What is cool today is very uncool tomorrow. In fact, because it is cool today it is bound to be uncool tomorrow. The problem with cool is that it is cool when you and I are doing it but it no longer is cool when everyone else is doing it. That is, the very act of observing and making public cool items will eventually lead to its own self-destruction. Coolness is like fragile wetlands, overuse them and they are no longer. When the cool kids see everyone else doing it and trying to become cool by comparison, then it no longer becomes cool to them and they tend to switch to something else. They are leaders and cannot afford to be like everyone else (even if everyone else is trying to be like them!) Selling cool to the public makes it inevitably uncool. Abercrombie & Fitch discovered this the hard way in 2003. For years it has strived to be the sexy-preppy cool ‘in’ look. For years, it worked. As the law of coolness states, once something cool becomes mainstream, it is no longer cool. And so it went with A&F, cool today, out tomorrow—and as a result same-store sales were down by 13%.

It is a cycle and like all modern cycles has become time sensitive and increasingly faster as the coolhunters hunt relentlessly to find the next big thing while the fashion conscious are ever aware of changes and wish to get in on the cycle earlier and earlier and generating tendency for change among the masses who follow. Yet those who originate cool then must work just as fast to change so as to stay in the forefront of cool and not get caught up with the multitudes just behind them. Like a foray into Alice in Wonderland, one has to run ever faster just to stay in place.

So the hunt for this ever-fleeing, ever-so-fragile, ever elusive, increasingly difficult to define object continues. Yet the rewards for being there at the precise moment when it is cool, of having that product or service available and packaged correctly when it becomes cool, of having sufficient demand to meet the onslaught expected of a cool product is tremendous. Keeping America’s (And the world’s) youth cool can be quite a lucrative business. And a fleeting one. Enjoy the fruits of being at the right place at the right time while it is happening for it will surely disappear as quickly as it appeared.