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Coolhunter' is a term used to describe the emerging marketing professionals whose sole purpose is to identify trends in order to market them back to the masses. Just like the coolhunter character in William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, coolhunters observe and make predictions about changes in new or existing cultural trends. They are on the lookout for what will be cool before it is cool. However, the problem with cool is that it is - of course - forever obsolescing. As soon as something becomes cool, it ceases to be cool, and naturally, by the time the uncool have adopted an idea, it has become necessarily uncool.
The very nature of coolhunting validates its existence. In his seminal 1997 article for The New Yorker, 'The Coolhunt', Malcolm Gladwell defines the paradox as a 'triumphant circularity'.1 He contends that the better the coolhunters become at bringing the mainstream close to the cutting edge, the more elusive the cutting edge becomes. 'The act of discovering what's cool is what causes cool to move on ... and because cool changes more quickly, we need coolhunters.'2 Professional coolhunters are on a cyclical mission to identify and research what could potentially be cool just before everyone else catches on. Coolhunting is a difficult undertaking, but the hard work can be worth it: once discovered, cool can be extremely lucrative.
Market research (both qualitative and quantitative) is a major component of coolhunting, and has the objective of capturing the attention of a mass market that is worth an estimated of $150 billion a year.3 Marketing to a new generation of brandsavvy consumers is no easy feat. The market is made up predominantly of teenagers, who have more spending power than ever before but who are also suspicious of marketing.
Barak Goodman and Rachel Dretzin investigate the coolhunting phenomenon in The Merchants of Cool. This insightful 2001 program for PBS's Frontline in the United States examines coolhunting and its symbiotic relationship with the media and today's teenagers. Frontline correspondent Douglas Rushkoff is shown describing how coolhunting works and its effect on teenagers. He builds up a convincing case to demonstrate how teenagers run today's economy, and argues that as a market group, they prove the most challenging to influence. As...