hip

Nomes aos bois:

"TRU is our lifeline to this market", MTV.

Look-Look

Jones soda

Pina Sciarra - Director of Youth Brands, Sprite
Brian Graden - MTV President of Programming
Jimmy Iovine - co-chairman of Interscope Records (mainstreamer of so-called antimainstream - aka Limpbskit pimp)
Todd Cunningham - MTV Sr. VP of Brand Strategy and Planning

Malcolm Gladwell - escreve para o NY Times sobre cool hunters.

Seu ganha-pão:

From Food Processing:

Brand names are less of a hallmark of quality and more a means for teens to define themselves. “Advertising to teens cynical about marketing demands that they believe they are discovering brands on their own,” says Jim Taylor, futurist and vice chairman of The Harrison Group (www.intellisponse.com/worlds), Waterbury, Conn, who divides teens into five groups: A-listers (popular kids in a crowd), American Dreams (regular hard-working teens), Individual Thinkers (opinionated leaders), Outsiders (estranged and suffering from low-self esteem) and Jack Blacks (or JBs, party kids).

Online buzz is king. “ ‘Did it break [as in break out]? Do my friends think it’s cool?’ Those things hold the most sway,” says Taylor. “It’s an opinion process that goes on through IMs [instant messaging] and text-messaging, and it applies to everything from movies to cargo pants.”


“Teens are an enormously important segment because they are disproportionately powerful in terms of being trend setters and early adopters,” says Keith Niedermeier, Wharton visiting professor of marketing. “Additionally they are an attractive market because of the lifetime value they offer. Capturing teens and establishing brand loyalty can launch decades of positive yields in the future. It’s an incredibly lucrative market, but definitely not for the faint of heart.” And he adds, “Nowhere does market research have a shorter shelf-life than when talking about the teen segment.”

Cool whatever tends to have a short shelf life for teens – if you are reading about it in mainstream publications, it’s too late.



Cool hunters Sharon Lee and Dee Dee Gordon, of Hollywood, Calif.-based Look-Look, a teen market research company, use Youth Information Specialists (or former teen innovators) to stay ahead of the trends. “Trends spread in a triangle,” says Lee. “At the top there’s the innovator (two or three percent of the population), underneath are trend-setters (17 percent), who pick up on the innovator’s ideas and claim them as their own. Under that, are early adopters (varies), who take what the trendsetter is doing and make it palatable for mass consumption to the mainstream (80 percent). The mass consumer picks up on it, runs with it and actually kills it.”



African-American teens are most likely to skip a meal and struggle to eat healthily.