The Merchants of Cool

In an attempt to understand the popular cultures of teens, the video The Merchants of Cool look at marketing companies and how they create and sell trends to teens. The video looks at the relationship between the two groups (marketing companies and teens) and how they both have a certain amount of influence on each other.

Who defines cool? Is it packaged or bottled in an assembly line somewhere? I guess you could compare the creation of trends and what is cool to a production company that's always changing the product they produce to appeal to a certain fickle costumer. In the case of The Merchants of Cool, the production company are the marketers, and the fickle costumer are the teenagers. Companies produce images and trends that are adopted and practised by teens. That is until a trend starts to get old and stops being something that was exclusionary, something that defined and seperated them from the cultural norm.


"...The desire to be cool is - ultimately - the desire

to be rescued. It's the desire to be pulled from the

unwashed masses of society. It's the desire to be

advanced beyond the faceless humanoid robots who

will die unheralded deaths and never truly matter, most-

ly because they all lived the same pedestrian life. Without

the spoils of exclusionary coolness,we're just cogs

in the struggle..." (The lady or the Tiger, Chuck Klosterman)

So in a cycle of producing trends, adopting trends, and then abandoning trends, the question, do teens drive what companies sell, or do companies drive what teens buy, arises. There is certainly an amount of reciprocation in the process, a sort of give and take relationship by both sides. When it comes down to it though, I'd say that teens drive what companies sell. It is true that without teens companies wouldn't know what to sell, and that is why there are focus groups to single out and zone in on the ideals of coolness by the select few they view as trend setters. However, while that may be true, it is also true that most teens wouldn't be able to pick up on these trends without the marketing companies paying the media to advertise their products taken from teenagers who have deemed them cool. An example of this would be the MTV show, TRL. Videos are voted on and played depending on the level of their popularity. The thing about TRL is that not just any video can be voted on though, it is most likely a video that was paid by marketing companies to be debuted. You can only want what is there is, and marketing companies use this to their advantage to make sure consumers know and see their products among the many others.

So while a trend may truly be exclusionary for a while until marketing companies discover it, it's only a matter of time before the companies repackage it and make it their own, offering yet another chance for those who stand outside the borders of being cool to cross the boundaries and ascend into exclusionary coolness.

Sometimes teens catch onto the when the media is trying to "brainwash" them though; it's happened with Sprite and their commercials using athletes to tell teens not to listen to athletes telling them to buy their products. In a world where everyone is following the mass of society and mainstream culture, there are groups of teens who strive to be different and not confirm to what society expects them to be. An example of this would be the rage band Insane Clown Posse and their fans.

The band's lyrics goes against the media and say that they'll never sell out to it. In The Merchants of Cool video, fans of the band say that the band's music provides them with a way to break out of mainstream culture and show that they are different. To them, the band is one of the only things that can truly be calssified as exclusionary coolness because the media hasn't gotten a hand on it yet.

I think Insane Clown Posse used this idea of exclusionary coolness to their advantage. I assume that they were informed on the fact that marketing producers were constantly on the lookout for trends by teens who could spread them. They probably also knew that the more exclusive their music was to certain groups of people, then the more buzz there'd be about them. I think the band Insane Clown Posse set a trap using exclusionary coolness to lure in producers and marketing companies. It took some time, but they're bait was taken and they were signed to a recording company. Of course I can't be sure of this unless I were get a verbal or written agreement by the band, but this is only a guess. If it was intentional, you've got to admit that it was pretty smart.

"...The impact of this understanding comes later in life,

usually college, and usually around the point when

being "weird" starts to be periodically interpreted by others

as "charming" and/or "sexually intriguing." As noted

earlier, kids don't really understand the naunce of cereal

advertising until they reach their twenties; this is when

characters like the Trix Rabbit evovle into understated

Christ figures. And though the plot is not purposeful

on behalf of cereal makers, it's also not accidental..."

(The lady or the T