"Merchants of Cool"

1.) Cool-hunting is when researchers look for what is “in.” They find the 20% that are trend setters for the other 80% followers. They search for a certain personality knowing what influence is going to come next. These researchers use surveys, case studies, focus groups and interviews to further their study.
2.) Television, music, and fashion corporations want to understand how teenagers think and what they want because they are the biggest age group consisting of 32 million and they have more money than any other generation. 150 billion dollars have been spent by them and their parents. Their parents will just give them money so that their kids will leave them alone to do work and other household duties.
3.) MTV executives and other programming and marketing decision-makers characterize their relationship to teem culture as seeing eye to eye with each other. They feel that they are reflecting what teenagers want and the things they enjoy and desire.
4.) The difference between marketing research and human research is that marketing research is knowing what people are going to buy and human research is knowing about the consumers and what they want. The goal of marketing is to be eye-catching to their audience and the goal of human research is to get to know them so that they will produce things the people want. For example, when the MTV group went into John’s house to see how an everyday teenage boy lives.
5.) The critics are giving the most accurate description of the relationship between teen culture and commercialization. Of course the merchants of cool are going to say what they want to think the relationship is, but their critics are going to say what is true and what they see. One of the critics from the video said that the standards will go down because of all the different things that are manipulating teenagers through music, TV, movies, and other things. These institutions are playing as agents of socialization. They somewhat guide teenagers into the trends and the things that arise and fall as these merchants of cool wish. In the video, Sprite used hip-hop music and stars to get teenagers to like and buy their product. While MTV would allow drugs, alcohol, and sex to be on their shows, showing teenagers that these things are okay, causing standards to drop just like the critic said it would.