Book review: How Cool Brands Stay Hot

I recently enjoyed reading Joeri Van den Bergh and Mattias Behrer’s book on Gen Y marketing: How Cool Brands Stay Hot.

What I liked most about the book was its objective, hyperbole-free approach.

In youth marketing, sometimes advice and thought-leadership is delivered too rhetorically.

To convince the reader that the writer understands young people, some take the view that they must first persuade the reader that they know nothing any more, that they have lost touch with a new generation and that all the rules of the game have completely been turned on their head by a momentous attitudinal and cultural shift that has taken place in recent years.

This book doesn’t do that.

Instead it drops some common-sensical bombshells.

For example, modern youth behaviour, attitudes and interests are often explained not by their generation but by biology. Young people like freedom, they push limits and they are more prone to risk-taking. They want to explore the world around them, express themselves creatively and construct an identity. Because they are young people and young people always have.

Youngsters who are still formulating their belief systems are attracted to well-defined and authentic brands that help them to strengthen their values and reinforce the identity they are building.

There’s a lot of brain-pleasing deconstruction in this book, rather than emotive manifestoism (although they do propose a youth marketing approach guided by CRUSH principles: Coolness; Realness; Uniqueness; Self-identification with brand; Happiness).

Of course there are Gen Y characteristics that get shaped, developed, encouraged by the times we live in. Youth like to control everything in their lives and don’t passively accept what is given to them. In the era of open source and co-creation they embrace involvement in content and want to be able to edit and change their environment. “A brand is not what a company wants it to be, it’s what Gen Y consumers want it to be.”

I liked the numerous ‘box outs’ and case studies. We learn more about the likes of H&M, Nike, Coca-Cola and Nokia and how youth relate to these brands. Diesel’s ‘Be Stupid’ campaign – derided by many as celebrating a careless, hedonistic attitude – is explained: “It taps into youth’s proneness to pleasure seeking and taking risks. It fights rational frontal lobe thinking and encourages youngsters to not suppress emotions and impulses.”

There’s a lot of wisdom and insight in How Cool Brands Stay Hot – well worth the read. You can find it on Amazon.