As someone with a background in industrial design and a specialty in technology research, I have spent a good deal of time thinking about “cool.” There’s always a new, cool product being introduced, a cool TV spot to love or hate, or a cool brand doing something remarkable. Heck, we even had a cool initiative at work a couple of years ago (and, as an aside, let me say that market researchers tend not to be ultra-cool but rather to hold a distinct geeky appeal). Cool is a tricky concept to define, but it can be easy to observe because it stands out—in Chasing Cool, Gene Pressman says that brands want to evoke cool because “cool cuts through. It’s the ultimate point of difference. When brands evoke the characteristic of cool they are more likely to stand out in today’s cluttered marketplace.”

If cool is difficult to define, it’s even trickier to master. A brand just can’t go out and decide to be cool. In fact, I’d argue that deciding to be cool is a very good way not to be cool. To be cool, a brand must have what my colleague Vaishali would call “swagger”—a belief in what you’re doing coupled with a willingness to go to novel places and do unproven things, to fail, and to be disliked. If you think about some of the cool brands that Pressman discusses—Nike, Target, MTV—you can conjure up a bit of of the swagger that I’m talking about.

All this said, when someone claims “cool” in the marketplace, I sit up and take notice. And then I start to critique. Is it a cool brand? Is what it’s doing cool?

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