Cool Hunters

Cool-hunting is the practice of surveying advanced and innovative consumer groups for ideas about upcoming trends. Cool-hunting originates in the fashion industry where, already in the early 1970s, a number of fashion houses (most famously perhaps Fiorucci) set up research offices that were charged with the task of surveying a rapidly developing street culture and translating its stylistic and lifestyle innovations into products that could be commercialized. Employees at the Fiorucci style office were paid to keep abreast of popular culture, and enjoyed yearly paid vacations to exotic places on condition that they brought home research reports. Such isolated examples of trend research offices developed into trend research firms during the second half of the 1970s. These firms supplied books and style sheets, listing the colors and patterns that were set to dominate next season's collections.

During the 1980s, trend research or cool-hunting spread outside of the domain of the fashion industry. This was in part a response to the perceived inadequacy of traditional methods of qualitative and mainly quantitative market research. It was also a reaction to the perceived increase in the mobility and complexity of consumer demand, resulting from the continuous mediatization of consumption and the pluralization of lifestyles. Cool-hunting was perceived as necessary outside of fashion—in particular for technology and home electronics—because consumers of these goods began, in a certain sense, to behave like fashion consumers.

Cool-hunting firms provide a number of services that are based on a continuous surveillance of the social. Their focus is mainly, but not exclusively, on the youth market (considered the vanguard of the consumer market as a whole), and the services that they provide include information on macro (general) and micro (market or product specific) trends; “brand trackers” that evaluate the standing of brands with respect to consumer awareness and “cool factor” trend analysis and lifestyle investigations. They also perform market research on particular brands and services and offer their services as consultants in product development, brand renewal, public relations, or corporate brainstorming sessions. Their major clients are media companies, cosmetics and fashion companies, publishers, communications and electronics, [Page 365]advertising agencies, and big brands. While some coolhunting firms also use traditional forms of market research, such as focus groups and ethnographic studies, the main source of the information they provide is a network of trendsetters and “cool” consumers.

Who are these cool consumers? What distinguishes the (mostly) young people employed by cool hunters is that they make up a group of expert consumers. They are the people who impersonate a trend before it materializes and actively take charge of producing new consumer trends by, for example, combining existing garments in a creative fashion or even making their own clothes.

Unlike the economic and social elites who have traditionally been understood as the leaders of consumer taste, the people approached by cool hunters have a particular expertise in the field of consumption that need not be connected to a more general elite status or even to high standing or competence in other fields. Cool hunters are interested in the people who possess an expertise in predicting or even anticipating fads and fashions, who have a motivation to constantly stay at the top of the field. These may be extraordinary creative and gifted individuals, but their edge consists mainly in their ability (and motivation) to interpret the position of others. Cool consumers are what they are because they are the first to articulate and materialize what everybody subsequently recognizes as general knowledge. They thus provide a way of appropriating the socialized productivity of the particular field in its entirety.

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