The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies

Coolhunting

NATALIE COULTER

York University, Canada

DOI: 10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs077

“Coolhunting” is a term coined within marketing circles. It came to the attention of the public when social commentator Malcolm Gladwell wrote an essay for the New Yorker on March 17, 1997, entitled “The Coolhunt.” Coolhunters are marketing professionals who “hunt” the streets to determine what is “cool.” In his article Gladwell describes how marketers seek knowledge from the street (often urban, minority youth), and then define, interpret, and repackage “cool” to sell to corporations, who in turn try to leverage this knowledge in the marketplace. Gladwell characterizes the coolhunt as a “collection of spontaneous observation and predictions that differ from one moment to the next, and from one coolhunter to the next.”

Gladwell acknowledges that the difficulty with hunting cool is that cool is in a perpetual cycle of obsolescence. Coolhunting itself is paradoxical, because, once something is discovered by the marketing professionals to be cool, it is appropriated and sold as cool and hence loses its coolness. Gladwell refers to this dynamic as “chase and flight,” a term often used to describe the fashion theory of sociologist Thorstein Veblen. In looking for the origin of trends in the street rather than in the corporate boardroom, coolhunting expects fashion and coolness to trickle up the social scale, rather than the top-down, upper-to lower-class, movement traditionally theorized by sociologists. ...