update on teh coolhunting scene..

via Los Angeles Times

Fads are so yesterday
# Trends are hot. Cool isn’t. As culture morphs worldwide at Internet speed, forecasters fight to stay ahead of it all.

By Gina Piccalo, Times Staff Writer

There was a time, way back in the late 1990s, when coolhunting was still cool, when nearly every Madison Avenue ad agency wanted a resident hipster to interpret the spending habits of those inscrutable Gen-Xers. Then the Internet exploded, connecting everyone to everything in an instant, and suddenly, the art of predicting the next big trend got way more complicated.

Today, fads ping across continents and disappear so quickly that the coolhunter, even the whole notion of “cool,” has become passé. Every big-city scenester or bored teenager on the planet has a blog or mass e-mail anointing the moment’s hot restaurants, hobbies and handbags. Add to this, mass obsession with celebrity style and global corporatization and you can get nearly the same chai latte or straight-off-the-runway skirt in Columbus, Ohio, that’s available in Manhattan or Milan.

Trend-spotting has, in essence, become just another trend. Consequently, the most successful trend forecasters are repositioning themselves as something more than mere arbiters of taste. They’re now social scientists with a hipster edge. That’s because it’s no longer enough to be aware of “sext messaging” or video blogs or the drive-in movie revival. The real money and prestige are now bestowed on those who can translate the cultural hieroglyphics and the “whys” behind these blips.

For this reason, they no longer answer to the name “coolhunter.” Some even bristle at the term “trend forecaster.” Instead, they prefer “planner,” “researcher” or “futurist.” They often compare their work to cultural anthropology, though few, if any, have formal training in that field. They’re quick to differentiate the short-lived fads from decades-long trends. They usually stress that their predictions are rooted in hard data.

They travel the world; watch people shop, eat and frolic; videotape and photograph them; monitor blogs; study census data; chat online with tens of thousands of consumers (most under 35); and devour every shred of pop culture they can find. They believe their research not only keeps marketing executives at Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Nike and Microsoft, among others, attuned to our cravings, but they map the origins of choice and cultivate that most precious commodity of all: consumer insight.

It’s an increasingly competitive field and even the most successful work hard to stand out. DeeDee Gordon and Sharon Lee of L.A.-based Look-Look Inc. specialize in youth culture and product development and brag that their 35,000-member database of trendsetters is among the largest of the competing firms. Jane Buckingham, president and founder of the Intelligence Group, is among the more visible of the top forecasters, with a show on the Style Network and a regular gig on “Good Morning America.”

New York-based Irma Zandl of the Zandl Group is known for her bimonthly Hot Sheet, a trend-spotting guide that sells for $18,000 a year, and for predicting about 25 years ago the takeover of hip-hop culture. And Faith Popcorn, a bestselling author, has been in the business the longest, having started New York-based BrainReserve in 1974. Yet in each of the last two years, she says, her annual client billings have doubled.

All agree that their specialty lies in interpreting the broad societal movements that transcend our flash fancies and reveal new marketing opportunities. In the future, some insiders say, it’s likely every ad exec will be a futurist.

“The world’s moving faster, so clients don’t have the luxury of waiting to see what’s going to happen,” says Ken Freeman, president of the North American division of TNS, a global market research firm. “They have to plan for it.”

Still, some see trend forecasters as nothing more than expensive soothsayers, bringing the illusion of control to a $250-billion ad industry wracked by uncertainty, a fragmented audience and anti-advertising technology.
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How can the effectiveness of trend forecasting be measured, anyway, when the line between a genuine societal trend and one manufactured by media and advertising is now so blurred? For example, isn’t our desire for more customized entertainment — iPods, TiVo and the like — a response to the overwhelming glut of advertising and information?

And would we be simultaneously enthralled and repelled by über-luxury if it weren’t for the reality TV shows and celebrity tabloids that bombard us with images of the “good life”?

“It’s easy to get lost,” says Mazzarella, “in this fairly fruitless argument of: Does the advertiser respond to society? Or does the advertiser guide society?”

Cultural anthropology has played a role in successful advertising for decades. But its importance has steadily increased since the 1970s, when marketers first faced the relatively daunting task of selling to the anti-establishment, have-it-their-way baby boomers. Still, it took more than 20 years before the ad industry took more than a passing interest in this shift.

By the 1990s, the baby boomers were the decision makers. Like their predecessors, they were confounded by a new brand of youth. The so-called Generation X, oversaturated by 1980s consumerism, proved too savvy for traditional marketing. At the same time, their tastes were often contradictory. Ad executives needed cultural translators to reach this group.

Fueling this impulse was the now-famous “coolhunt” article by Malcolm Gladwell in a March 1997 issue of the New Yorker that followed Gordon and then-Reebok general merchandise manager Baysie Wightman as they mined hipster enclaves for trends. At the time, Gordon’s L Report, a quarterly tipsheet on what cool kids across the nation considered cool, was selling for $20,000 a year. “What they have is what everybody seems to want these days,” wrote Gladwell, “which is a window on the world of the street.”

The article inspired swarms of hipster consultants who for a short time were considered the silver bullet for any faltering campaign. But as trend forecasters look back, they realize this, in itself, was a fad.

“I think ‘coolhunting’ was a sexy word that the media loved to use,” says Gordon. “Our culture loves creating new nomenclature. It’s very faddish. It doesn’t accurately describe the study of trends and analysis and what goes into it.”

The value and lifespan of information changed rapidly in the late 1990s. Just as Internet access and download speed rocketed, so did the transfer of ideas, making what was “cool” obsolete from the moment it was discovered.

“It used to be that you had to have the Louis Vuitton Murakami purse,” says Buckingham. “Well, now you can get the $10 version on [Manhattan’s] Canal Street. So when you talk to teenage girls, they say they buy the fakes because it’s all about just showing you know the trend — not even the value of the trend itself.”
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After the New Yorker “coolhunt” article, Gordon and Lee founded Look-Look Inc. and quickly earned a reputation for pioneering online youth-culture research. Like their competitors, they won’t disclose their annual billings, but Gordon says the company’s billings have increased each year since 1999 from 50% to 150%. Their clientele has grown too, now including Kellogg’s, Microsoft and Nordstrom.

“Ten years ago, it was harder for us to get the kinds of projects that we’re getting now,” says Gordon.

Look-Look recently helped Telemundo relaunch its youth network mun2. They created ethnographies of 24 young people across the country and then enlisted 24 others to create blogs, both of which were studied closely for marketing opportunities.

Although Telemundo also used more traditional market research for this project, Look-Look’s work provided more refined, in-depth insight on Latino youth culture and the complexities within it, says Antoinette Zel, the company’s senior executive vice president of network strategy. Specific results of the work aren’t yet public because the project isn’t complete.

“We gave [the participating youth] Polaroid cameras, we gave them journals and the stuff that came back has just blown my mind — really unique voices that we haven’t heard before,” Zel says.
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Walt Disney Co. has consulted Zandl for years, using her Hot Sheet to inform its product development and marketing strategy. When Zandl predicted a retro revival four years ago, Disney launched a line of vintage-style T-shirts that proved so popular that it expanded the line to include stationery, toys and a $1,400 T-shirt sold by Dolce & Gabbana.

Zandl’s insight, says Jana Jones, director of consumer insight at Disney Consumer Products, “is the bottom brick you need when you build these strategies. Typically, people are already sensing [certain trends are] happening in the market. It’s really the validation that we can go forward with them.”
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Name any fad, any cultural whim, and Popcorn can either recall how she predicted its emergence or fit the observation into an emerging trend. Oxygen bars? Our obsession with “being alive,” she says. The mass use of cellphones? All part of our need to live “99 lives,” simultaneously.

At the same time, Popcorn’s mind is constantly tuned into the tantalizing “what ifs” of tomorrow. Her 2001 book, “Dictionary of the Future,” predicts the proliferation of a “cosmetic underclass” who can’t afford to erase their age, a parent education movement that issues permits and product discounts to well-trained parents, and “personal archivists” who organize the e-mails, digital images and other data that help document our existence.

When asked about today’s obsession with cool, even Popcorn sounds peeved. She moans: “It’s like everybody’s hip now. It’s exhausting. There’s no discovery. It’s not original.”