ABSTRACT
Just as cool has become part of the language of popular culture, so it has become the preferred language of marketing for many companies targeting not only the youth market but also the now increasingly mature baby boomers who believe that a cool lifestyle is their birthright. Cool crosses cultures, age groups, socio-economic classes and national boundaries, existing as a tribal kind of identity, one which many marketers expend large resources trying to capture. However, the chameleon-like quality of cool and the exclusive nature of its tribes set the marketers a daunting challenge. In the hope of providing some enlightenment, this chapter will consider tribes in the context of Pierre Bourdieu’s thoughts on Distinction, place cool in a historical context and attempt to define this elusive concept. It will also discuss the commodification of cool, the role of cultural intermediaries, the phenomenon of coolhunting and present a marketing research case study involving the search for cool.
Whereas traditional tribes tended to focus on geographical or ethnic identification, shared heritage, conservative values and a sense of putting community
interests above one’s own, when the sociologist Michel Maffesoli wrote ‘The Time of the Tribes’ (1996) he specifically excluded this usual anthropological understanding of a tribe and referred rather to ‘postmodern tribes’. Far from having any historical tradition, the tribalism he explored could be ‘completely ephemeral, organized as the occasion arises’. As in postmodernity generally, stability gives way to fragmentation, a sense of belonging is superseded by multiple identities and style takes the place of substance.
