Merchants of Cool

"If you don't understand and recognize what they're thinking, what they're feeling, you're gonna lose, you're absolutely gonna lose."







I actually watched this film in high school in a sociology class, which shows the film is getting pretty dated. I think it is a relatively good representation of teenagers growing up in marketing. I think marketers do a really good job of finding what teens are looking for and they pretty much take advantage of them using various tactics. Their strategies like "cool hunting" and paying kids to promote products are definitely working in a strong way. It's kind of scary to think marketers go to this level to sell their products. Sprite was smart to connect their brand to hip hop and create that involved connection with teens by becoming "cool" themselves.

I agree with the statement that after the cool is found the cool moves on to something new. This makes it a constant battle for marketers to keep up with what's cool and separate that from what's old news. The most interesting part of the film to me was the ending when it showed that Insane Clown Posse became mainstream after all that talk about the importance of staying away from radio and following the mass. One of the band members was talking about how strongly he was against the idea, as well as the majority of their fans. This just shows how important popularity and profit are to people.

In terms of the actual documentary Merchants of Cool I think they did a good job, but they could have added more. They showed very limited perspective from actual teenagers, which is very important in the point they were trying to make. Overall though I think they had good insight into different effects marketing have on people. There will be a lot of people that can't relate to the teens they chose in the film, but I think it's impossible to relate to everyone. They can't cover it all, but they did well covering what they did. Well done.