New Market X New Strategy = Cool Future

New Market x New Strategy = Cool Future

In Naomi Klein’ article, “Alt. Everything”; the Youth Market is discussed and the strategies behind this market is analyzed by giving examples of the Marketing of Cool. At the beginning of the article referring to author’s youth experiences; it was introduced that in their cosmic counter-culture, teenagers get to be a part of a general consumption system while they believe that they are behaving totally against it. Actually the natural process of self-definition as an indispensable teenagers’ need, is substituted with a branded culture, which is namely sold out to capitalist system. So to be more clear and apparent about this situation, for instance rock fans start to go festivals and believe that they are anti-system, while they are just consuming and capitalist sponsor make money out of them.

To explain this change in consumption, the author confirm that in early nineties; after the start of baby boomers’ downfall in consumer chain, the need for a new shoppers’ class filled with the Youth Market. Thus in order to sell the same products to this new market, the capital owner starts to create organization and brand identities which is identical with these new culture characteristics. In addition, at this point, the Marketing of Cool is described as a solver for youth marketing, which trigger the best demand while this knife edge of the interaction between this new market and the capitalist companies in mid nineties. So the teenager’s envy to be cool, feed with this new understanding of marketing and the past product-driven companies replaced with new image-based brands like MTV, Nike or Hilfiger.

As the way of sale changed, the structure of sale changed either; the employees of the past would be today’s “change agents”, which are the legal Stalkers chasing or designing the “Cool”. For instance Tommy Hilfiger promoted the concept of living the “American Dream”, so they sell the fetish of black style to white youth and the fetish of white wealth to black youth. More over the process of “Sell” skimmed to the process of “Be Sold”; which means in order to wait the consumer to buy the product, companies engenders the product be sold such as Daewoo hires college students to talk up the cars to their friends or Budweiser send “Bud Girls” to campus parties to promote Budweiser beers.

The importance of Youth Market