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this information is a bit outdated since the documentary was filmed long time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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