Malcolm Gladwell,

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Malcolm Gladwell, The Coolhunt (HCC Reader, pp.
119-131)
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1. What is coolhunting? (p. 119)

• Coolhunting is a form of market research that
  involves scouting out new trends in urban
  subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing.

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2. What is the role of the world of the street
in coolhunting? (p. 120)

• Coolhunters are interested in what urban youth
  groups, including minority groups, are wearing,
  listening to, etc. Skateboarding, snowboarding,
  and hip hop are some of the groups observed by
  cool hunters. What people are wearing on urban
  streets in major cities (Tokyo, LA, New York,
  etc.) is also the object of observation.

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3. Why did coolhunting make the job of sneaker
designers and marketers harder rather than
easier? (p. 120)

• Scouting out new trends sped up the design cycle.

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4. Why cant Malcolm Gladwell write an
encyclopedia of cool? (p. 121)

• Coolhunting, like cool, is not systematic. It is
  spontaneous, observational, and always changing.

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5. According to Malcolm Gladwell, how did Tommy
Hilfiger become cool? (p. 121)

• Possibly because he had a multi-ethnic team of
  young people from different parts of New York and
  the world working for him. Or, maybe it was just
  the endorsement by hip-hop auteur Grand Puba.

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6. What is diffusion research? What do hybrid
seed corn and Hush Puppy shoes have in common?
(p. 123-5)

• Diffusion research is the study of trends.
• Hybrid seed corn and Hush Puppies both spread in
  stages, by word of mouth.

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7. Why is cool something that companies and
marketers cant control? (p. 125)

• Cool is a question of choices made by a select
  group of young people, who might be powerful
  taste makers but are otherwise often pretty
  disenfranchised (by virtue of youth, race, and
  money). Companies can intervene in the cool
  cycle by scouting out a trend and marketing it,
  but they cant actually create cool (according to
  MG at least).

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8. What are some of the different ways that cool
hunters in the 1990s did research? (pp. 127-8)

• Surveys distributed to very specific groups and
  analyzed geographically and demographically with
  uncool control groups (yeah, that would be me)
  larger, vaguer panels of kids more
  impressionistic tools including video cameras.
  Since Gladwell wrote his piece, design
  ethnography has become a major research method
  among fashion marketers and a great second
  career path for anthropology majors.

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9. What are the three rules of cool?

1. Cool cant be observed accurately, because as
   soon as you call something cool, it starts losing
   its coolness.
2. Cool cant be manufactured, only observed.
3. You have to be cool to recognize cool.

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10. Malcolm Gladwell published his essay The
Coolhunt in 1997. How do you think coolhunting
has changed in the last 12 years?

• The internet is the main force that has changed
  coolhunting. Sites produced through
  user-generated content (like Threadless.com)
  decentralize coolhunting the artists submitting
  to these sites are helping to identify and
  generate as well as market and purchase cool.
  Rating systems and numbers of hits are great ways
  for marketers to collect trend information
  without having to leave their office cubicles.
  Many blogs are essentially cool-hunting organs,
  with the authors scanning their areas of interest
  for the latest thing and then publicizing it.