Reflections on "Merchants of Cool"

Today, we watched a a short film called "Merchants of Cool." The following are my thoughts:

No longer content to make a profit from existing culture, corporations are actively creating culture that they can then promote and sell. As part of this, corporations are actively targeting teenagers. Through "cool hunting," these corporations look to current trends in teenage culture in order to predict future trends early enough to subtly market them as new and hip. Since teenagers are generally leery of marketing, these efforts are discrete. Since trends are considered "uncool" as soon as they are marketed, "cool hunting" aims to exploit that nebulous time when something is cool but has not been "discovered."

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