The science of cool

Being cool is not an essential condition of brand growth, but it does have its benefits.

Companies with cultural cachet often find it easier to recruit the best talent, for one thing, and a 2019 study found that consumers say they are willing to pay higher prices for cool brands, and more likely to recommend them to friends.

So, there are material advantages that make coolness worth pursuing for a brand. But is being cool something that marketers can engineer?

Probably not with any great precision. As well as being both subjective and dynamic, coolness has an ineffability that makes it impossible to codify. No person or machine will ever be able to predict something like the 2024 craze for Stanley cups, which saw people camp outside Target to secure limited-edition drops from a 110-year-old manufacturer of insulated tumblers.

But just because something can’t be perfectly understood doesn't mean there's no point understanding it imperfectly. After all, many of the domains in which marketers operate are unpredictable; that’s just the nature of human decision making. And while there are no step-by-step guides to imbuing a brand with coolness, academic studies have produced some useful definitions and parameters that can improve a marketer’s chances of cultivating the ‘it’ factor.

The paper mentioned above (Warren et al, 2019) is one such study. Here, the authors used qualitative methods — such as focus groups and in-depth interviews — to define the most common characteristics of cool brands among people in Europe and the US.

According to the study, cool brands tend to be viewed as one or more of the following: extraordinary, aesthetically appealing, energetic, high status, rebellious, original, authentic, subcultural, iconic, and popular. There is some crossover between this list and the ones that predict what traits make people seem cool, but only some. Unlike people, brands don’t need to demonstrate cultural knowledge in order to be viewed as cool, for example.

The authors also found that it is perfectly possible for brands to remain cool as they become more popular. Although such brands will start to seem less rebellious and authentic to their original subcultural customers, the masses will view them as more popular and iconic, which is a far more profitable position to be in.

A study published in the Journal of International Marketing this year built on the findings of Warren et al by suggesting that there is ‘a universal duality’ at the centre of coolness, at least when it comes to products.

Pol et al (2026) surveyed hundreds of people in the US, Germany and China, and found that the meaning of cool is generally consistent in each of the countries, even if the way that it manifests varies from culture to culture.

The researchers posit and substantiate that there are two facets to coolness. The first is the ‘personal interpretation of coolness’ (PIC), which means that a product is cool because it excites someone or makes them admire it. The other is the ‘social interpretation of coolness’ (SIC), which means that a product is cool because other people endorse it.

In all three countries studied by the authors, participants said that PIC was more important to them than SIC. However, the gap in importance between the two interpretations was smallest among the Chinese participants. Later in the paper, the authors suggest that Chinese participants respond differently because their culture of status is based more on ascriptive characteristics — like family background — than personal achievement, but the sample sizes used were too small to really back up this theory.

As well as being more dominant, PIC has another advantage over SIC, in that the latter is more likely to generate negative stereotypes. Products viewed as cool for social reasons, for example, are more likely to be derided as fads purchased by superficial people.

Aesthetics correlates equally to both the personal and social interpretations of cool, which makes it arguably the safest route to coolness. But in general, if marketers want to make their product cool, they should, this study suggests, start with PIC, focusing on intrinsic factors, like usefulness, and then layer on some social indicators of cool afterwards.

Admittedly, these insights leave lots of room for interpretation, not to mention confusion. But you were warned that cool is too ephemeral a concept to ever be reduced to a formula. Besides, if there’s one thing that is definitively uncool, it’s assiduously following instructions to copy what’s come before.

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