August 19, 2004
cool hunted to extinction
“Nike. Cool hunted to extinction.”
I just wrote that phrase. No idea what it means.
Actually, that’s not entirely true, but… Eh. I’m still chewing on it etc. Anybody who does know what it means feel free to leave a comment.
These days Apple is the ultimate cool hunter’s wet dream. Remember when Nike had the same cachet? What the hell happened?
The trouble is, every other cool hunter and his mother is watching the Apple brand with the eyes of a hawk.
Steve Jobs can’t even go to the bathroom without every member of every “cute-sounding-supposedly-cutting-edge division of large, dinosaur agency” peeking over the stalls.
nike shoes are made from the skin of animals. those animals are cool. those cool animals are being hunted to extinction!
Nike was really cool some years ago. Then other companies (Puma) tried to be cool, too. They hunted Nike — pursued it’s coolness -, and sooner or later it will extinct.
“Nike. Cool hunted to extinction.”
Nike has hunted its image of being the cool products to extinction, it needs to work on a new one!!!
I would like to think that it was bad press about Third World exploitation and Nike’s sweat shop production strategy, but am pretty sure this is not the case.
Hugh, I love your site and would one day like to hear your thoughts on this topic, too. Lately I have been reconsidering my career in advertising because I question the ethics of the biggest clients…
I think it means; try too hard to find and use ‘cool’ to sell products, and the concept loses its original meaning.
The originality and individuality that is inherently assoicated with the notion of ‘cool’ can’t exist in paralel with mass-marketed products and cross-media advertising campaigns of the corporate giants selling the stuff.
Nike and cool are something of an oxymoronic pair.
Damn, Hugh, that’s almost poetry.
Obviously, this is not specific to Nike. You can substitute almost anyone’s name, including individuals who alter their habits to attain cool.
Going back to the idea of poetry, I think we can say that cool is a lot like the muse
I agree, it’s a demo of the “trying makes it worse” phenomenon seen in any given activity. Jerry Colonna talks about how it affected his writing here: “In my heart, I knew that if I forced it, obsessed about it
I agree. Trying to be cool never ends in actual cool. Actual cool is a result of creating something original. But you can’t try to “be original.” That’s the same as trying to be cool. It always ends badly.
Sometimes you can’t tell from the outside the truly cool companies from the merely trying-to-be-cool-because-all-we-actually-care-about-is-making-money companies. But ultimately, you find out, I guess.
As far as creativity goes, I’ve definitely found that trying to be original or cool always kills the project.
I agree. Trying to be cool never ends in actual cool. Actual cool is a result of creating something original. But you can’t try to “be original.” That’s the same as trying to be cool. It always ends badly.
Sometimes you can’t tell from the outside the truly cool companies from the merely trying-to-be-cool-because-all-we-actually-care-about-is-making-money companies. But ultimately, you find out, I guess.
As far as creativity goes, I’ve definitely found that trying to be original or cool always kills the project.
I think it means nothing is cool anymore. It has lost all meaning since being seconded by corporations and their marketing monkeys to sell stuff — sometimes useful, mostly not.
We’ve killed cool. All we have are product pushing gimmicks — even street level (i.e., non-corporate stuff). For a minute and half rap and hip hop were cool till we understood they were all into starting their own “cool” clothing line and “branding” it.
Cool is dead.
(Gee … I haven’t been that cynical in a while. It’s quite bracing!)
No way! There is a lot of cool stuff out there, and by that I mean stuff that was inspired by the muse or flow or God or the force or the funk or whatever you want to call it. Hugh’s cartoons and John T Unger’s work are the two closest examples. Yes– there is a ton of crap out there today. But, with blogs and the net we can cut through it more easily than ever before. I think things are looking up.
Nike became too good.
Part of “cool” is scarcity. If you find one really cool thing a year, you’re lucky. But cool hunters are turning up in Milpitas crack houses and Baghdad barbershops and the flow of new cool is torrential. A transnational brand can’t say “this is cool” every five minutes and be trusted.
So Nike has two choices.
Shift from “cool” to some other value, something enduring that survives fads. Perhaps competence, or integrity, or comfort.
The other is to fragment their identity to match submarkets, filtering out all but clearly niched coolness, at a trickle that engenders trust. The (formerly Nike) Hammerlock wrestling shoe community. (formerly Nike) TwoPoints indoor women’s basketball.
I also wonder about Heisenberg. Is the public concocting faux cool for cool hunters?
An Endangered Cool List?