Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Merchants of Cool for May 25th

Chia-Hao Chang
999672426
Prof. Abdullah
ASA 004
24 May 2017
Merchants of Cool for May 25th

            In the documentary “Merchants of Cool”, the author suggests a large teen run economy happening in United States. Yet, teens spend over 100 billion US dollars a year contributing to the economy. As a result, many cooperation are looking into the teens market, In average, teens watch over 3000 advertisements a year and over 10 million advertisements throughout their lifetime. Marketing plays an important role here and is what companies appeal to the teens in the economy. Also mentioning in the documentary, about 75 percent of teens spend their time watching TVs and 1/3 of teens constantly browsing on internet. Personally, I believe this information is a bit outdated since the documentary was filmed long time ago. The number of teens are internet/ social media has definitely grown significantly with the introduction of smartphone devices. Companies are looking for cool hunting, meaning that they are always looking for the teens that are heads of “cool”. Companies spend millions of dollars researching and finding what the next trend of cool is. In such way, the companies may have a huge profit opportunities. However, this is easy to say than being done. Cool is constantly changing during times, and the cool happening today may not be applicable in tomorrow. It’s a rather complicated task to find the next coolness. For instance, Sprite was one of the first companies to hire a NBA celebrity to film for marketing. However, things did not go so well after many years and audiences thought this marketing strategy, in which hiring celebrities is not credible for the brand. Therefore, Sprite had to find another way to market to mass teens. In doing so, they actually went underground to understand hip-pop culture, or a culture that is beloved by many teens. Also, similar thing happened to “MTV”, a television channel that is popular amongst many teens, they were targeted as being too “commercial”. “MTV’ later changed its marketing plan and target more “personally” to teens in getting their favorites.

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