We Could Be Coolhunters When the Pandemic is Over
How cool are we?
Definition of cool: There are thousands.
They’re all different, but there is one characteristic we could agree on, and that’s that cool is the differentiation, what stands out, the personality of something.
The term coolhunting exists in marketing, which is not the same as trend hunting in fashion. Coolhunting is precisely what these two words mean: hunting what’s cool. And help to create a prediction of trends.
How, where, whom, why? Coolhunters are people dedicated to understand the trends of the mass and make sense of those to sell it to companies for their target development. They are everywhere, mostly young people, and indirectly, during the pandemic, you and I received essential tools to become one.
In the book, Coolhunting by Marta Domínguez Riezu mentions that to hunt the cool, once a week we must visit certain places and live specific experiences. When the world shut down, the people of entertainment and local businesses made up inventive ways to attract our attention, giving us these experiences from home:
Movies and Theater:
Stories will always be the most recurrent way to an artist for expressing in any discipline of the arts. They wake us up, give us an opinion, they place us in standards we weren’t able to comprehend, like accepting that a mute woman falls in love with an amphibian god or, to know what would happen in a specific country when aliens come for us, etc. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, and all the digital platforms advanced their premieres after movie theaters were closed, Disney+ even did a premiere on their streaming site for the movie Onward, and many others intended to keep us satisfied.
And theater also wanted to take part in it and started to giving us plays on YouTube, Vimeo. They were one of the first to charge to watch a live show online. The London National Theatre gave us access to a different play almost weekly; we could see productions like Small Island, Frankenstein, King Lear, 1 Man 2 Governors, and plenty more. Andrew Lloyd Weber as well on YouTube gave us Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, gifting us the opportunity to see these plays from the past that we probably couldn’t attend before and with that obtaining inspiration and learning from these stories.
Museums and Exposition Rooms:
The day the world stopped, without a doubt, museums were the ones that had it harder, how to bring people closer to the art from afar? Not being able to observe real colors, movements or brushing techniques, and so many other details that we can see when we’re there, some museums offered digital guides of specific expositions. With this facility, we could visit museums in Italy, Spain, and Mexico from wherever we were. So, it was easy to understand the world of museums, painters, sculptors to let us drowned in their art and the experience they had for us.
Music Shops:
To go to a music shop and not knowing what to find is an experience that helps to create trends. Through music, one can understand history, sociology, demographies, and stories. This time, musicians and singers didn’t leave us alone and told us with their songs what was happening in the world.
Clothing Stores:
In her book, Marta Dominguez advises going to clothing stores of any price, style, and class. When everything started to close, fashion shows and designers made their expositions via Instagram Live, Facebook Live, YouTube, or through their websites, giving us full access to their inspirations and how they translated it into garments.
Gadget Stores:
I don’t get them, I don’t go often, but when I do, given a chance, I feel like I’m in a place I don’t belong, and that sensation and experience is necessary to comprehend things outside our comfort zone. During the pandemic, to be honest, I didn’t keep up, but I think Animal Crossing had a lot of relevance, and gadget stores continued online? At least one must know what’s new. You don’t have to understand it entirely, but be aware.
Markets and Supermarkets:
As a guide, Marta Dominguez shares to look for bizarre products, absurd and absolutely unnecessary. We are still able to do this since these places are always open. We can find these products, understand them, study which products are around them, understand why they are at that specific place, what they are related to, their price, and even the height of exposure they have.
Book Stores or Libraries:
We can go to these places with the required precautions, but I don’t think it’s necessary to explain how a book helps and affects the reductions of trends and the inspiration that adds to our projects. To choose a book one doesn’t identify with could help experiment the sensation of not belonging and obtain other experience from the book than the knowledge inside.
Sport Events:
Sports are a sociological manifestation, and for a while, the absence of these types of events reflected uncertainty. To know about sports helps to understand colloquial expressions and even political.
The reason why I attended football ⚽️ games was the joy of the environment around my seat, to cheer my team, and to make friends for 90 minutes. We can’t go back yet, so we’ll have to see the matches to understand statistics, maybe some healthy gambling, and see what to get for future trends.
Concerts:
Concerts canceled from one day to another, I remember, at the beginning of the quarantine, thinking this would be a couple of weeks, oh, how wrong I was. Some singers and musicians shared older concerts on YouTube or their websites, and, while they kept us entertained, we were able to see the development of their music.
The last resource to be a coolhunter is to travel, and this one hurts me deeply.
To travel:
It is healthy, that’s it. For now, we’ll have to postpone this resource, but Google made a way to” travel” the world through Google Earth, so we could see popular places around the world as if we were there.
One must go outside to keep up with trends, what’s recurrent, what everyone is talking about, topics that will be discussed tomorrow on the news or Twitter, and during times of a pandemic, all of these came to us. Through Twitter, we saw how other countries were living their quarantine, and a sense of calm came when the Queen of England talked to her nation and all of us.
Whether we want to be coolhunters or not, we can find similarities in how sensitive, vulnerable, and paying attention to change we are, everyone, without tags, not caring where we come from, how we look, or how much we have. We received the tools to understand each other but, what do we do with this gifted culture, the free courses, the new abilities we have? What’s interesting about coolhunting is to see how everything, even though we all look different, we have connections through music, gadgets, movies, etc. It won’t be long until we see what coolhunters made with this information and how we react as masses.
