Did You Used To Do This At School To Be Cool?

A couple of posts I read earlier today got me thinking about “cool” and “brands”.

The first was Adam Ferrier’s post at Consumer Psychologist, “How Cool Are You?”, which talks about what makes people cool and and how he and team at Naked have built on some earlier work and developed a Facebook application (so you can take a questionnaire and determine how cool you are).

Then Dan Pankraz’s blog talked about Branding Bedrooms in Austria where he discovered that, despite kids living outside big cities, they loved urban streetwear brands and that both boys and girls often ask the staff in shops for stickers so that they can brand their bedrooms with their favourite brands.

Those posts combined to take me back to my school days …

I went to school about 2 hours from the ocean but one of the surrogates for being cool was surf brands - just like the Austrian kids living outside the big cities but still wanting to buy urban streetwear brands. We lived in-land but loved all the surf brands.

The other big thing that was a surrogate for being cool was how you branded your folder and you were only cool if you had a folder which you had covered with loads of surf brand logos. Truth be told we should have been studying but instead we would spend hours scouring our old surfing magazines for logos to cut out from their ads. We would take the logos and stick them on our folder and then apply contact (being so f#%&ing careful not to get bubbles in it!).

It might just be my perception and old memory but you wouldn’t have been caught dead without a great looking surf branded folder and we would often gather round when we noticed one of our mates had created a new folder (extra points if they put some bikini babes on it and the teachers never noticed!).

The thing that struck me today was that, back then when we were such avid fans on brands, the brands did absolutely zero to encourage and fuel this behaviour. Maybe they knew about it, maybe they didn’t. Maybe they weren’t worrying about the kids 2 hours in-land and instead concentrated their efforts on kids near the sea?

I wish I could find a post I read a few months ago that talked about consumers walking a path because my description coming up doesn’t do it justice. The post talked about how it isn't a brand’s job to create a path and try and make people go down it or to lead them in a certain direction. People are already on paths and journeys and as such it is the brands job to join them on their path, to pull in alongside the consumer, and help guide and make the journey more enjoyable (points for whoever can show me where that post is).

So do kids still do this sort of folder stuff? Or did you used to do it yourself?

If kids do still to it then it provides an awesome opportunity for popular brands to fuel this kind of brand love and surrogacy for cool. They could be giving kids the tools to create folders and they could run competitions for best folder design. Or are they doing this already and I am just too far removed from that market and don’t have sight of it? Does anyone have kids in this age group? Enlighten me …

This stuff was all happening before we really had the internet in our homes so maybe the surrogates for cool have shifted to iPhones etc. If so, does anybody have any great examples of how brands are engaging youth? By that I mean not creating events and sites that attract the kids but instead walking the path they are already following e.g. folder design, and getting involved an helping them

Man I wish I still had one of those folders …

Remember When Your Parents Yelled At You?

I was reading the blog Dan Pankraz vs. Youth and the post Start Whispers … never Yell. In the post his 25yo cousin says of brands “Whisper don’t yell at me…if you whisper, i’m more likely to listen to what you’re saying and tell my mates”. Dan goes on to note that “the more intimate gestures we provide to youth via a ‘whisper’ the more likely they are to listen”.

It reminded me of a meeting I was in the other day. There were 6 of us and one of the people at the meeting was one of those people who seemed to just command respect in the conversation because when he spoke we all listened and no one jumped in before he was finished. Why?

Because he whispered.

We’ll he didn't exactly whisper whisper but he spoke really softly. He certainly didn’t yell. It seemed to me that he was deliberately speaking quietly so that people would listen.

Some people are just quietly spoken, never wanting to be in the spotlight, but there are others who use it as an effective tool to make themselves heard. Sounds like a contradiction right? Speak quietly so that you are heard!

What can actually happen when someone, in a conversation, speaks quietly, is that others have to stop an listen otherwise they may miss something important and it may be hard to continue the conversation.

It means that the others have to slow their thoughts down (instead of rapidly thinking about what they can say next) and it means the speaker can command respect and make sure their point is made. The flip side is that if they spoke really loudly, aggressively and never let you finish your points then you would get the impression that they didn’t really care what you had to say and they didn't really want to have a proper conversation with you.

It reminds me of one of Hugh MacLeod’s (GapingVoid.com) cartoons which reads “if you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face”.

Remember when you were a kid and your parents yelled at you? Well, because you didn’t have the guts to punch them in the face you next option was to not really listen. Instead you just nodded begrudgingly and waited for them to finish. You didn’t really take in anything that they were saying (which probably explains why I was in trouble half of the time).

Are brands really that different especially when a lot of us talk about having conversations with the market?

Think about it. Does the brand you work for feel as though you are yelling at people all the time? Maybe not as extreme as yelling but does your brand just broadcast at people? If so, chances are, just like when you were a little kid, your customers are not listening.

Are there brands that you feel yell at you all the time and could take a softer approach to get your attention?