Teens represent a sizable portion of the population (approximately 32 million), and they have tremendous buying power, as well as influence, over the buying power of their parents. Teens are worth approximately $150 billion annually as a market segment in the United States. This number is too large for marketers to ignore. Today's young people, however, are generally unresponsive to traditional brand marketing messages. What they do respond to is something "cool." A Frontline film, The Merchants of Cool, shows how corporate marketing tries to catch cool in teen culture and how media giants try to become cool with media savvy teens. In order for a marketer to find cool, they have to find a way into the young person's mind and learn how to "speak with teens' language" in the relationship existing between youth culture and the media. How do teens decide what is cool? The Merchants of Cool shows how media contributes to the manufacture of the image of cool, even though their goal is to find out what is cool. Say a girl walks into her high school one day wearing a specific style of shoes. Where did she get the idea that those shoes were cool in the first place? Perhaps she saw them on the cool girl in her favorite reality TV show, or maybe she saw a cool celebrity wearing them in a magazine photo. It does seem that both the media and teens search for what is cool, and they tend to feed off one another in a circular fashion. For marketers, it comes down to finding the coolest of the coolperhaps those that are, as of yet, the least emulatedand capitalizing on their coolness to reach teens. To find the coolest of the cool, marketers need to reach teens using channels and settings through which they are likely to respond. In today's world, a marketer for MTV would not be likely to stop by a Wednesday night youth group meeting at a church to talk to teens about what is coolthis is not their demographic. Instead, they might set up a website that becomes a gathering place for teens with enticements such as chat rooms, blogs, games, photos, and contests; through this channel they could gather a vast amount of information from teens who are interacting among a group of their peers in a setting that encourages them to share their thoughts on what is cool. Teens get excited when they try a new product and almost consider it a challenge. They look for new technology and new products and want to share their opinions on virtualenvironments. Tremor, a marketing service by the Procter & Gamble Company, is taking a different approach in that they promote their service with supporting teen word-of-mouth influences. Teens join the Tremor service for free not just to review products, listen to unreleased music, view movies, and help design a video game but also to acquire inside information related to product development. A coolhunting firm is a marketing agency whose exclusive purpose is to research youth in areas of fashion, music, television, lifestyle, and culture. Understanding how to sell to teens requires knowing what teens think about. If companies can get in on a trend or subculture while it is still hidden, they can be the first to bring it to market. Information on what is cool can be used to create products that will reflect back exactly what the kids will want. So coolhuntersthose who can track down the latest cool trends in teen lifecan profit from this information. Coolhunters are always seeking ways of seducing the attention of young people. They use pop culture to emphasize a new meaning in a cool trend and even create new trends in ever-changing youth cultures. At Trend Hunter, they want to "find out what's cool before it's cool." As the world of technology continues to evolve, marketers will continue to struggle with finding the product that entices teens into thinking it is cool. This service provides an opportunity that may give a company the boost it needs to sell their product and get into the teen market.

Questions 1. How do teens create value through coolness of a product?

2. Teens respond to something cool, but cool keeps changing. So, if you're a marketer, how do you find cool?

3. Teens certainly appear to be a difficult demographic group to reach. What is different about this demographic group (teenagers) compared to other sectors of our society targeted by marketers.

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