Coolhunting: Chasing down the Next Big Thing

Citation

Goldsmith, R.E. (2007), "Coolhunting: Chasing down the Next Big Thing", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 24 No. 7, pp. 444-445. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363760710834861

Like the Holy Grail, coolness has often been sought. Unlike the Holy Grail, some seekers actually find it. How to succeed in finding what is cool, and even creating it, are the topics Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper's new book, Coolhunting. This is an ambitious task. By definition, it seems, coolness defies definition, and once embraced by many people, ceases to be cool, leaving the searchers to look for the next cool thing. However, the authors of this book do a fine job of restricting their discussion to a set of limited perspectives on cool and its hunting. This makes their job manageable and their book a pleasure to read.

This book is actually about social networks as a source of new ideas, practices, and products. The authors promise on the first page that they will tell how to use and create social networks to predict and foster cool new trends (The notion that some new trends are not cool is unexamined. Does the same process yield uncool novelty? One suspects so.)

Noting that there is a lot of current interest in this topic among businesses, the press, and social scientists, they quickly make it clear that what they mean by “cool” are new things that are excellent, fun, and useful: “To us, things that are cool make the world a better place, in some way” (p. 7). Moreover, cool ideas, in their view, often come from the behavior of COIN's, Collaborative Innovative Networks. The collective mindset of “swarms” of people is the source of cool, new ideas. The key idea of the book is this: “The coolest – and thus most desirable – trends are the ones that feed off of this collectivity, this collaboration. In fact, the process through which innovation reaches great numbers of people is, itself, an example of swarm creativity at work” (p. 4).

The goal of the book is to introduce readers to two related concepts: coolhunting and coolfarming. Although there has been and remains a great deal of interest in coolhunting, discovering the latest trends before they take off and spread throughout social systems, Gloor and Cooper limit their discussion to coolhunting among defined social systems (the COIN's) and describe several ways that coolhunting can be accomplished that go beyond the standard marketing research techniques such as focus groups and ethnographic research (theirs is quite a different perspective).

The core of the book consists of chapters describing the use of social networks to uncover new and useful ideas, practices, and behaviors. Thus, the nature of “swarm creativity” based on the beehive metaphor is used extensively. This is where the COINs come in. “COINs are cyberteams of self‐motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in achieving a common goal – an innovation – by sharing ideas, information, and work” (p. 23). From their analysis and use of COINs, Gloor and Cooper derive several recommendations for potential coolhunters seeking to find the latest, cool ideas: give power to the social network, let the members self‐organize, rely on collective intelligence to solve problems, and make predictions. The authors base many of their recommendations on both case studies and their own experience analyzing social networks and how they function.

Of particular interest is Gloor and Cooper's presentation of the use of sophisticated computer programs to automatically search through social networks and reveal the patterns of information flow and influence that characterize them. Drawing on a variety of examples, including ENRON and NASA, they show that predictable patterns repeat in different social networks. Trendsetters and gatekeepers can be identified and their influenced literally mapped. The authors demonstrate how others can use these automated tools for their own coolhunting purposes. These chapters might be the main reasons some readers would read this book.

One interesting finding is how online social networks mirror offline social behavior in that trendsetters emerge to play the role of innovators and influential information/advice givers. This makes Coolhunting a good companion volume to Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (2000) and Ed Keller and Jon Berry's The Influentials (2003), both of which discuss the key role a few influential individuals play in spreading new ideas through social systems. Unlike these other books, Coolhunting does raise the possibility that the social networks might go wrong, make a mistake, or be used for evil purposes, but they never really give solid advice for identifying when this is happening. Perhaps this level of wisdom is too much to ask, but it does raise some challenging issues for all students of social networks.

Gloor and Cooper, however, go beyond the description of coolhunting as a search for trendsetters by formulating the idea of coolfarming, “getting involved in the actual creation of new trends by nurturing and cultivating new ideas” (p. 83). As one of the most original contributions of the book, the chapters on coolfarming are intriguing in their suggestions for creating COINs and using them to identify trends. Potential coolfarmers are encouraged to give power to the network, seed it with ideas, mandate intrinsic motivation, and recruit trendsetters. Then, the social network self‐organizes like a beehive and attacks the problem at hand. Hunting these COINs can yield new and useful ideas, and voila, you have found the next cool thing.

Coolhunting is a trade work written in a journalist rather than academic style. It abounds in examples and anecdotes, many from the authors' personal experience. It is certainly not “scholarly” because it cites no formal research and tests no theories. It presents the authors' ideas in an easily digested fashion that will encourage readers to begin their own coolhunting and coolfarming activities. The authors are so enthusiastic about their subject, however, that at times their concept of “coolhunting” becomes almost meaningless as it is extended to cover almost every social activity. Does everything that happens in cyberspace merit the label of “cool”?

The book seems to be targeted exclusively at business executives and at times promotes the authors' own software. However, in so far as it achieves its aims of explaining coolhunting and coolfarming to the management community, it can be recommended as a good place to start.

For those seeking to learn more, two other books on the topic of social networking can be consulted: Emergence: the Collective Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2002), by Steven Johnson, a journalist, and Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means (2002), by Albert‐Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist. For an antidote to the upbeat tenor of the book, see “The Ignorance of Crowds,” by Nicholas G. Carr, Strategy + Business, May 31, 2007, which focuses on shortcoming of the open source model, the background to Gloor and Cooper's coolhunting and coolfarming recommendations.