What is Cool? A response to Virginia Postrel's blog- THE DYNAMIST

Virginia Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies.

She writes the Economic Scene column for The New York Times business section every fourth Thursday. She writes a column for Forbes four times a year and publishes articles on cultural and economic topics in a wide range of other publications. Her influential web blog, the Dynamist, can be found at www.dynamist.com.

In a blog entry, dated December 4^th, Mrs. Postrel talks about an interview she had recently in which the interviewer asked her the question “What is Cool?”

“Friday afternoon, I had an interesting phone conversation with Steven Levy, who is writing a book on the iPod. At one point, he asked why I thought the iPod had managed to stay cool even after it became ubiquitous. Doesn't a gadget have to be exclusive to be cool? No, I said. That's one kind of cool. There's another kind that depends on the intrinsic aesthetics of the product. An intrinsically cool product doesn't have to be expensive or hard to get to stay cool.

It's easy to think of cool electronics. Flat-screen TVs are cool. So is the Motorola Razr. Come to think of it, flatness is simply a cool feature in electronic products. Their cool factor doesn't depend on who owns them. That doesn't mean flatness will always seem cool. It could easily become normal and boring. (I remember when silent light switches seemed incredibly cool.) If we get used to the looks of something, if it starts to fade into the background, it loses its cool factor. But it's a mistake to confuse freshness with exclusivity.”

When I tried to think of how I would define cool, I seemed to contradict Mrs. Postrel’s statement about ownership. I think that in order for something to be cool it has to have an air of exclusivity about it.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, he discusses the possible means by which Hush Puppies became a major fashion trend.

“The brand had been all but dead until…somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995. Sales were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the shoe that made them famous. But then something strange happened. At a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives ran into a stylist from NY, who told them that the classic Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs. ‘We were being told there were resale shops in the Village and SOHO, where the shoes were being sold. … In 1995, the company sold 430,000 pairs and the next year it sold four times that and once again Hush Puppies were a staple of the wardrobe.

How did this happen? Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren’t deliberately trying to promote Hush Puppies. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them.”

It wasn’t because the design of Hush Puppies had changed and incorporated a new feature that made them cool. They were the same brushed-suede shoes they had always been. What made them cool was a basic principal of economics – supply & demand. It wasn’t easy to find Hush Puppies anymore. Trendy, club hoppers looking for something different to wear stumbled across these old shoes and started wearing them. They became cool because not everyone had them.

I think one of the comments made on the Postrel blog hit it right on the head. “You can’t define coolness because “coolness” is more about the emotional than the intellectual. Sometimes you can explain why something, it is super fantastic. Other times, you can only feel the super fantasticness - the recognition that the emotional response to the item under consideration precedes and sometimes preempts the rational consideration, so that we want something before we know precisely why we want it. It is his opinion that if we train out tastes over time, through exposure to truly wonderful things, we can come to rely upon such emotional responses as being worthwhile of acknowledgement. For example, the shoe designer, Manolo, does not need to articulate and explain why he loves a particular shoe, because he can feel, and he has learned to trust his tastes in such matters of feeling.

This it is exactly what is happening to Virginia. She cannot articulate why something is cool, but she nonetheless knows.” So, ultimately cool is a personal attitude that is developed over time and can be influenced by ones surrounds and ones experiences.

When is an insight truly insightful?

As we begin to wrap up the semester, and reflect on the lessons learned and the topics covered, I realized that one of the topics that had been over looked in the discussion of consumer insights is WHAT MAKES SOMETHING AN INSIGHT?

We have talked about how to conduct research to uncover insights about our customers, but when is research just more data and when is it elevated to the point of an insight? Early in the semester we had a presentation from the Consumer Insight folks at General Mills and I was off-put by their attempt to convince me that their latest product offering, Cheerios with Berries, was a product borne out of insight. “Well, you see we observed people putting bananas in their cereal and realized that people like fruit with their cereal.” Honestly people…wake up. You don’t have to do ethnographic studies to know that people like fruit with their cereal. Hello…Kellogg’s Raisin Bran???? It’s been around for 60 years. Actually the first version, developed by a company called Skinners, was launched in 1926. Or even granola…how long has that been around – oh, since the late 19^th century? The next thing they are going to tell us is that people like nuts in their cereal.

If you simply had some competitive intelligence data you could have recognized this preference. I have a hard time even calling this a trend because it has been around for 100+ years and doesn’t seem to be experiencing any sort of intense growth.

So, this brings me to my first criteria for classifying research as an insight. If others have already perceived an act or outcome and addressed it through social commentary or business problem solving (ie. new product development), it can no longer be considered an insight. Instead it is merely an observation, when you bring it up. An insight must be unique and original.

Last week, I listened to Jerry Seinfeld’s last stand-up act “I’m Telling You for the Last Time”. And no matter how many times I listen to this routine, I never cease to be entertained and impressed with his ability to uncover human insights. Seinfeld's observational humor is as timeless and sharp as the day he first performed it. The great thing about Jerry Seinfeld's sense of humor is that he makes you see completely ordinary everyday circumstances as hilarious events. His jokes are familiar to you in a way because they incorporate a universal element to them.

If you ever hear him talk about how he comes up with his jokes, you will learn that most of them come through direct observations. Comedy is a very serious business, and the easy flow of a smooth performance belies the deep digging that goes into the art of creating it. Seinfeld closely links successful humor with logical discipline--needed to trick your audience into believing in the setup--and declares that "laughs contain thought." Not given to looking at a psychological angle for what motivates great comics, he does ultimately define the comic's project as "an exploration into the self" that requires a hyper-detailed awareness. It takes him at least half a year to hone a routine into a finished project, he observes.

I believe the most successful comedians are those that find the commonalities of life that people experience but don’t necessarily go around talking about to one another nor do they even think about the underlying motivation. For a comedian, discovering the motivation that only exists in secrecy is where the joke or the insight lies. It isn’t about the vulgarity or shock value that makes a comic popular; it’s about finding a subject matter that relates to many people.

This brings me to my second and third criteria for an insight. The act or outcome must be widely substantiated by a significant number of people. And despite its applicability to a large group of people, it can’t be obvious.

So, the next time you are trying to learn something insightful about society…take a lesson from one of the greatest comics of this generation. You too can be the “master of your domain.”