Essays on Merchants of Cool

When most people imagine a “corporate executive,” they picture a conservative man or woman in a nice suit making sensible decisions. However, corporate executives do not always answer these pictures. In 2001, Barak Goodman, Rachel Dretzin, and FRONTLINE correspondent Douglas Rushkoff filmed the documentary “Merchants of Cool.” The aim of this paper is to analyze how “cool” corporate executives look like and how they influence the world we live in. Every business has its target audience, and it is not only adults but also teenagers. In the United States, teenagers constitute a significant part of the user market. Every ...

In "Merchants of Cool", so-called "cool hunters" are featured. Cool hunters are marketers who, in search of the next "big teenage craze", attempt to scientifically research how and what to sell to the rapidly-growing teenage demographic. Cool hunters collect marketplace data about teenagers through exhaustive surveys, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and even personal visits at home. Of course, the goal of a cool hunter is to tap the teenage marketplace for about $100 billion a year (Rushkoff, 2001, internet). Moreover, the estimated size of this very large demographic -- about 33 million Americans -- makes it especially lucrative (Rushkoff, ...

Merchants of Cool

Teenagers in America have a great deal of disposable income; in fact, it is approximately a $150 billion market. Marketers are focusing on teenagers more than any other group to market products to. Marketers conduct focus groups to study the culture of teenagers. There are approximately 32 million teenagers in America, the largest generation of teenagers ever. The amount of money they spend makes some say “teens run today’s economy.” One reason that teenagers have some much disposable income is from guilt money, the money that their parents give them because they cannot spend as much time with them. Teens ...

The Merchants of Cool is a PBS documentary which deals with how young people are completely influenced by the material culture which surrounds them every day. The principal problem Rushkoff presents is the fact that young people are extremely gullible and will do anything to look cool and please their peers with the resultant fact that they end up purchasing things and gadgets which they do not really need. Under the Radar marketing is continually practiced by several firms who make use of sophisticated marketing techniques to enquire what young people deem to be cool thus then passing on ...

Since the beginning of radio and television broadcasting, the world has had a new and faster way of learning about the world that had never been given to them before. Families sitting in a living room listening to the latest details of an ongoing war or having dinner watching the latest episode of Jackie Gleason, the way technology affected us and our daily habits was forever changed. The same also holds true today. From sporting events to election campaigns of the next world leaders, there has never been a better way of communicating to the masses anything that someone with the money ...