About a month ago we watched a documentary called The Merchants of Cool. It really dug deep into how PR and marketing controls the world around us. It talked about how much we're exposed to, and basically how the world is a sexual powder keg on the verge of explosion. The movie hit on two main points:
1) The idea of 'cool' is a paradox
2) Who keeps it cold?
What is cool? Cool is defined as being fashionably attractive and or impressive. But cool is never constant, it's relative and always changing. Cool is what comes before what's in the now.
The paradox, as stated by Dee Dee Gordon, is that as soon as you make something cool, it ceases to cool. In the documentary, which was made in 2001, Limp Bizkit was really cool among alternative folk. However, once they made it big, they got a gig on MTV. They then became regulars on this MTV show where viewers pick the music. People started calling them sell outs, and the band became obscure. You see, once something from the 'underground' makes it mainstream the underground deems it uncool and moves on to fresh meat, leaving the originally cool thing to die.
Brain Graden says what MTV does wrong, especially in the above instance was that they broke the number one rule of marketing: don't show your cool. Even though everything on MTV is a commercial, you can't make it apparent, the audience can't know that.
To avoid doing the aforementioned they must do marketing research to see where the cool trend is heading. Research isn't about studying someone as a person, it's about studying them as a customer. The goal is to sell them something, not to make them happy.
But in marketing who is dictating the standard of what is cool? Marketers ask the teens what they want so that the advertisers can market for it, but kids want what they see on television, and what is on television is what kids said they wanted. So who's calling the shots here? Answer: no one. We all fall prey to the viscious cycle of society.
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