Marketers shaped youth culture to drive teenage commercial spending

Evidence

The entertainment media have undergone many transformations since the 1960s. The multibillion-dollar teenage market became big business for pop music producers, clothing manufacturers, fast-food franchises, and the beverage industry. Marketers commercialized a teen counterculture with new entertainment media that could serve their purposes well. A PBS documentary, The Merchants of Cool, provides a glimpse into how marketers crafted the media to shape the buying habits of teenagers (Dretzin & Goodman, 2001). Through “cool hunting,” marketers looked for what was cool and the trendsetters and early adopters. The hunters must become cool themselves to avoid being seen as establishment outsiders. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 999

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Naomi Klein’s No Logo on brand-driven youth culture and to the general literature on manufactured counterculture (Frank’s Conquest of Cool).
• DEFINE: Defines ‘cool hunting’ — the practice of recruiting trendsetters as commercial scouts.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘cool hunter must become cool’ inversion — how marketers absorb and neutralize dissent by performing it — as a case study in manufactured authenticity.