Consumer behaviour and the quest for cool

According to consumer psychology, there's a recipe for being cool. And surprisingly, the ingredients are similar across a bunch of countries and cultures. So today, we explore the concept of cool: what it says about our values and how it influences us. But be warned — if you try too hard to be cool, it might unravel your attempt before you even get there. You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on the ABC Listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts. Guest: Caleb WarrenConsumer psychologistProfessor of MarketingUniversity of Arizona Credits: Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Simon BranthwaiteMore info: Trying too hard or not hard enough: How effort shapes status https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcpy.1400What Makes Things Cool? How Autonomy Influences Perceived Coolness https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/41/2/543/2907572?redirectedFrom=fulltextCool People https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-xge0001799.pdf

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  Growing up, Caleb Warren was not one of the cool kids. His words, not mine.

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  When other kids were like going out drinking and being destructive and, you know, having, having a grand old time and not worrying about what would happen the next day, I was probably reading or studying, something like that.

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  The thing is, it's not like Caleb's interests as a teenager weren't cool.

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  I sort of came of age in the nineties and two thousands. And, you know, when I, my first time I was aware of what was going on culturally, it was like Nirvana and the grunge movement. And like, that was so cool.

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  And then by the time I was in middle school and high school and like the boy bands and Britney Spears were getting really big, like I was already sort of indoctrinated into this whole Kurt Cobain authenticity is everything ethos. And I thought it was like just pop show and the least cool stuff imaginable.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  So his interests were perfectly cool. The problem was his personality. Again, these are his words, not mine.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  It was more, much more my personality.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  See?

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Like I was very future focused, way more so even as a teenager than I am now. And that's not cool.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  So there's kind of a, I don't know if it's a joke or just like a truism in my field, that we study things we wish we were better at. But I always wonder like, how come I'm not cool? And now I have a better understanding of that.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  That's because Caleb is now a professor of marketing at the University of Arizona.

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  And I study consumer psychology, including questions like, what makes things cool? And what makes things funny?

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  These aren't frivolous questions. Cool matters because it drives culture. It directs consumer behavior. It moves markets. But cool is also notoriously hard to pin down. It's ephemeral and amorphous, and people have different ideas about what is and isn't cool.

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  It's always in the eye of the beholder.

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  But Caleb's research has found a remarkable universality to cool as well. It turns out the secret sauce to cool is pretty much the same in many cultures around the world, from China, to America, to Australia, to India.

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  In every country we looked at, we found the same six attributes are distinctly cool.

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  How is that possible? And what is this sauce? And can I please have some? Today, chasing cool, why we care, whether being cool is the opposite of being good, and we ask, how far back does the concept of cool go?

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  Something like Oscar Wilde would go have like a lobster as a pet or some crazy thing like that. That is, like, that seems like cool hipster behavior.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  But I don't think they were using the word cool then.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  I'm Sana Qadar from ABC Radio National. This is All in the Mind. It's not like Caleb grew up planning to study the concept of cool one day, but he was doing his PhD in consumer psychology. This was around 2008-ish. And the big question in that field is, why do people buy things? But the answers he was coming across at that time didn't seem to fully explain it.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And so I'd go to the psychology department and they would say, well, the reason people buy things is they have a positive attitude towards it. And I'd go to econ and they'd say they buy things because they have a preference for it. And neither of those explanations seemed wrong to me, but they didn't account for a lot of what I was observing, like why my friends were spending three hours flipping through used records, or the people I saw in Boulder were like jumping out of helicopters to go skiing, or my students were buying, who don't have any money, were spending a hundred dollars on designer jeans. Like, it seemed like all these people were doing those things because they thought they were cool. And so I wanted to study that. And at the time, there was very little research, a serious academic research on coolness, or

• 4:52Speaker 03

  what cool is, or certainly what makes people or brands cool. And eventually, what distinguished me from the other people who were studying this at the time is I tried to collect quantitative data to test my ideas. There were a couple others, but I was one of the first people to start running experiments, testing what is it that influences what other people think is cool or is not cool.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Caleb's early studies looked at the relationship between autonomy and perceptions of cool.

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  If you look at the people and brands that are the most cool and have stayed cool for a longer period of time, it tends to be those that have gone their own way. They're not doing something for the approval of others, or because they're trying to fit in, they're following their own path. And that's kind of what autonomy means. And in that early work, what I showed was brands and people are cool if they're autonomous, but only if they do that in a way that seems appropriate.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Here's an extreme example of what he means.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Serial killers and rapists are autonomous, but they're not cool. Because even though they're breaking the rules, people don't see this as being acceptable. It's like, you can't, you can't just be indiscriminately breaking rules to be cool. You can only break the rules that people, when you break them, people question whether that rule should have been there in the first place.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  So basically, there's a sweet spot for autonomy. And one of the ways he tested this was through a study involving indie rock bands. Remember, this was around the late 2000s. Indie rock bands were very cool.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  All based in Asheville, North Carolina at the time. I'm not sure if any of them are still together, but the names were Wages, Hermar Gold, and Electric Owls.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  I mean, are these not the most perfect indie band names you've ever heard?

• 6:44Speaker 03

  And one of my best friends was in Wages at the time, and so in this community. So he and his friends let me interview them for a study and make up answers to one of the questions. And the question was, why do you make your music? And then I could manipulate how autonomous they were. And in the low autonomy condition, they say something like, we just make music that we hope everybody will love. And in the sort of moderately autonomous condition, they said, you know, we make the music we like, and we hope some others might enjoy it, too. And then in the highly autonomous or inappropriately autonomous condition, they said, we do what we want, and we don't care what anyone thinks.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  And then we had people rate how cool the different bands were and which ones they, we could let them download MP3s, which were a thing at the time. And so the band that was considered the most cool and where the participants downloaded the most music was the ones that showed this moderate level of autonomy.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  And how did you have this hunch about autonomy in the first place?

• 7:44Speaker 03

  I think it came from who I saw and had read about as being held up as cool icons, both cool brands and cool people. So Apple would come up all the time. Apple's, when it took off as a brand in like 1984, really, with the Macintosh, their statement at the time was, if you're using IBM and PC, like you are, you are this conformist drone. We're gonna like smash that.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Apple's first ad literally showed a mass of zombie-like people marching towards a screen where a dictator is carrying on. And then a woman runs up to the screen and throws a hammer at it.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  What was groundbreaking about that ad in particular, what was really cool, was it never actually showed the product it was advertising. And so the effect was it just left the audience with anticipation and curiosity.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. And then they had that 1997 ad where it was a tribute to the wild ones. There's the people who break the rules, basically. Here's to the crazy ones. The rebels. And throughout their history, they've always positioned their brand, even as they became the market leader, as being sort of this rebellious alternative to whatever was normal. They were trying to show like they're autonomous and the people who use it are autonomous. And I would look at the musicians I thought were cool, like Green Day and the punk bands, grunge stuff, like Bob Dylan, artists like Tom Waits, who most people don't know, but people who do know think are, is really cool.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Like the Beatles, not in early Beatles, but later Beatles, when they were breaking all the rules of what could be done with music. Like all of them, they seemed like they were doing their own thing, rather than be market oriented, which was one of the main principles you learn when studying marketing, which is what I was doing, is the way to succeed in marketing is to find out what people want and give it to them. And that is not autonomous, that is not cool. So coolness is interesting also in marketing because it's an example of where market orientation can backfire. If you're in an industry where consumers value cool brands, then you might not want to be market oriented.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  This is an interesting conundrum. Like, is it self-defeating to try to be cool? Because obviously, cool is desirable. People want to be cool. Is it self-defeating when you try?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  It's self-defeating if people perceive that you are trying to be cool because it's always in the eye of the beholder. And I think that many of the coolest people are trying. It just doesn't seem like they're trying. Like, one of the most, one of the strongest motives, goals, needs for humans is to have status to be approved and respected by others. But if others think that we're just doing something to try to earn their respect, they won't respect us for it.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Right, you're a tryhard.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, or you're a sellout, or something like that. So the way we get around this is we deceive ourselves. So we can also deceive others into thinking that why we're doing something, you know, why we're buying that, that hundred thousand dollar sports car, or that very expensive, I don't know, designer jeans, or whatever it is, is not because it's gonna help our status, but because we really like the performance of the car, or the jeans fit better. So this need to deceive really yourself, and especially others, about trying is especially true for status based on coolness, because so much of it comes from being seen as autonomous. So one of my projects looks directly at this question. This is one with my, my brother, who's now also a marketing professor.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Caleb and his brother ran a series of experiments in which they asked participants to think of either a cool person or a wealthy person. And in some cases, the people they thought of became cool or wealthy by effort, and in other cases, they got there without trying, by luck or good fortune. Then, participants had to judge each person's status, writing things like how much they admired them. Caleb says the study relied on participants coming up with their own examples of people who fit these descriptions, because the quality of cool in particular is so subjective.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  And we see this sort of fun reversal, whereas people who are, you know, who put in the effort, when that effort leads to wealth, are seen as having higher status. They're more respected. But it flips for coolness. People who are cool without trying are more respected and gain higher status than those who are cool with trying.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Caleb says this is because wealth and coolness have different ideologies underlying them.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Like there are different reasons that these things lead to status. The reason that we respect people who are wealthy is because we infer that they've contributed more by producing economic goods or other things that then get spread around and advance society that way. It sort of comes from this industrial mentality and a lot of industrial cultures where wealth was seen as a sign that you move society forward by producing more stuff. Whereas coolness is, I think, the status hierarchy that is more valued in cultures that rely on innovation and creativity. So in information cultures, it's not about the amount of stuff, but about the ideas. And the best ideas are the ones that move things forward.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  And so the way that you show that you're cool is not by producing more stuff, but by being different, by being autonomous. And so their effort is self-defeating. Whereas in the wealth hierarchy, people who get wealthy without trying, it means that they didn't produce anything. It means that they inherited it.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Right. So for wealth, effort is a good thing, but when you're trying to be cool, it ain't.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  So the meaning of effort changes depending on what that effort is being used towards.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  You're listening to All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. I'm Sana Qadar. Caleb Warren is a consumer psychologist and a professor of marketing at the University of Arizona, where he researches what makes brands and people cool. And if you really want to understand the key to cool, it's probably not in the products, but in the people.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  One of the first really good articles on coolness written was by Malcolm Gladwell, when he was writing for The New Yorker. He wrote an article called "The Cool Hunt." And his thesis in this article is basically, if you want to understand cool products or brands, you need to look for the cool people. Because the way brands become cool is the cool people use them. And then as more adopt them, as uncool people use them, they lose their coolness and the cool people move on to something else.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  The cool folks are fast movers. They make something cool, and then they're on to the next thing.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  And that is true. And that explains a lot of it. What it doesn't explain is what makes those people cool to begin with.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Caleb's most recent research has tried to answer this. He and his co-authors polled nearly 6,000 people across 12 countries, and they wanted to know which specific attributes make a person seem cool. But also, whether those were different to the attributes that make a person good, and whether all of that differs across cultures.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  The question we're trying to ask is what makes people cool? And when we started this project, there had been about 10 years of research on this question before, and most of it found that people are cool when they have other positive traits, or desirable attributes. So people are cool when they're attractive, when they're friendly, when they're, basically when they're good. So what we wanted to see is, is cool just another synonym for good? Or is there something distinct about being cool that is not just the same as being desirable or positive?

• 15:41Speaker 02

  To investigate this, Caleb and his co-authors asked participants to imagine a person they knew. So, not a famous person.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Although in some of the studies later, we did expand it to famous people, and the results were the same. But they think of a person they think is cool, or other people think of a person they think is not cool. And then we can look at differences. There's a third group who thought of somebody they know who they think is a good person, and a fourth group who thought of someone they know who they think is not a good person.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Then, in each of these conditions, they asked the participants to write the person they were thinking of on 15 different attributes.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  So five personality traits. Are they extroverted? Are they introverted? Are they agreeable? Are they open? And then 10 other sort of values or attributes. Are they powerful? Are they autonomous? Are they hedonistic?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  And so what did you find?

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, in every country we looked at, we found the same six attributes are distinctly cool.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  So cool people are autonomous, they're adventurous, they're open. So those three are all kind of similar. And then they're extroverted, they're powerful, and they're hedonistic.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  This is bad news for introverts and nerds, I suppose.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Maybe. Well, I mean, nerds are in some ways defined by not being cool. So that's not news for them. And I would much rather be a good person than a cool person.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  In his study, good people were found to be a bit more conforming, traditional, secure, warm, agreeable, conscientious, and calm. And the fact that these results were consistent across cultures, did that surprise you?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Yes. So we wanted to look at both cultures that are considered weird. That's an acronym, meaning Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. So that would be the United States, Australia, Spain, Germany. And then the non-weird ones would be South Korea, Nigeria, mainland China, Hong Kong, Turkey, Chile, Mexico, India.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  So that is like such a wide array of cultures. So like, it is shocking that cool is universal. Like, there's a universality to the concept of cool.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  That was what surprised me most about this. Especially because there's huge cultural differences in the extent to which cultures are individualistic versus collectivistic.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  And so I thought that would matter. But in terms of what people see as cool, it doesn't. Now, data that we don't have, that I would like to get at some point, is to what extent does a culture care about or value coolness? So even though coolness means the same thing, it might be that in individualistic cultures, they value coolness more than in collectivistic cultures. And we can't, we can't tell that from this data. All we know is that cool means, really, the people who are cool have the same attributes across cultures.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Caleb and his colleagues have run several follow-up studies on this. And each time, the same six attributes pop up for describing cool. Being autonomous, adventurous, open, extroverted, powerful, and hedonistic. So that is the secret sauce to coolness. Whether you care is up to you. Like Caleb says, it might be better to be good rather than cool.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  One thing I wanted to ask, I'm not sure if you can answer this, is when did the concept of cool emerge? Like 500 years ago, was there a version of cool that people talked about, or not so much?

• 19:18Speaker 03

  There's a bit of debate here, where you see it coming up more frequently, and I think, like, where more confident it was used was sort of in the early jazz scenes and beatnik scenes, and especially the 40s and 1950s, this word started to be used a lot more often in these pockets. And then it spread with sort of the 1960s counterculture, and since then it's spread around the world. And in all of our studies, we never had to translate the word cool.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Because in every country we did research in, people, at least the younger ones, would know what cool meant, and they would use that word. So even though the rest of the survey was in German or Korean, we would leave the word cool untranslated, because that word is used similarly everywhere. And that was what allowed us to do this research, because otherwise, it'd be really hard to say, like, well, what's an exact translation for this word? You know, there are different, there's all sorts of different slang words that mean something similar, but those slang words fall in and out of fashion all the time. Whereas the word cool has been used pretty consistently since at least the 1950s, if not even earlier.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  But the concept or idea of cool, like this kind of desirability, that's tenuous. Is that a new thing, do you think? Or did we have words for that centuries before?

• 20:37Speaker 03

  That's a really good question, and it's a hard one to answer. So the challenge that I had, especially at first with studying coolness, is you can't define it objectively. And, you know, lots of people had tried to define coolness. I think in the Brand Coolness Project, we looked up definitions, and there was something like 70 or 80 different academic definitions of coolness. But the thing that people agree on is cool is in the eye of the beholder. So the way I got around this difficulty of defining coolness objectively is to just say, I'm just going to look at what people are perceiving to be cool or not. And that's where I started to see this convergence. And in this most recent study, it was, people see cool people as having similar characteristics everywhere in the world.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like, there's also the dichotomy there, where cool is both universal, but also in the eye of the beholder.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  It's in the eye of the beholder, but people see it similarly.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  So yeah, the short answer is like, it might be possible to take, if we can get really good evidence, and I guess we're starting to get that, that the meaning of coolness is consistent. And we looked at that bundle of meanings and then looked at, all right, what are some other words that have been used to describe people or brands or objects that have this bundle of meanings historically? So we could see, you know, does this go back farther? I mean, I'm pretty sure there is a concept like that, that was valued especially in countercultures and in wherever cultures valued innovation and creativity. Like if you go back to sort of like the like bohemian subcultures or like the Parisians

• 22:15Speaker 03

  in the late 1800s or something, I bet you would see similar values.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  A similar type of status system. Like I remember someone like Oscar Wilde would go have like a lobster as a pet or some crazy thing like that. That is, like, that seems like cool hipster behavior.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  But I don't think they were using the word cool then. But I'm pretty sure it's tapping into the same, the same idea.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Is cool a young person's pursuit in particular? Like, it seems to matter less as you age, right?

• 22:46Speaker 03

  I don't have data specifically on this, but I suspect yes. And there's a couple of reasons, I think. One is as people age, like they tend to become the norm. Like who's, who's setting the norms for a culture? It tends to be the adults. And so like the people who were cool when they were younger by going against whatever the adult norms were, those things end up, often end up changing and becoming the new norms.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  So like being cool becomes less important and less relevant for, for many people as they age. Now, I think it depends a little bit on your culture. Like if you're in a culture where there's A dictator or some small group that dictates the cultural norms throughout, then maybe being cool continues to be a viable route to status even in that culture. But I mean, one of the, I think clearest examples are if you look at, so what was seen as cool in the United States in the 1960s. Many behaviors associated with the counterculture and the hippies, like all of that became sort of normal, standard stuff.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Like pursuing your own creative endeavors became the norm in like the 90s and the 2000s. And so it was no longer so cool. It was just normal. And I think that often happens. So that's one reason I think young tends to be associated with cool. Both young people are more likely to be seen as cool and also probably care more about it.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  And I guess based on what you know about cool now, what would you say to like your teenage self? Um, I don't know how much you cared about whether or not you were considered cool back then. But like, what would you say to be, to your younger uncool self?

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say, I would say, don't worry so much about being cool. It's better to be a good person. And I think I was not as good of a person as I could have been as a teenager because I was too worried about being cool, which wasn't something that was, I was going to be able to be regardless, but I could have been a better person. I think by focusing more on others and doing more to help them, rather than being so focused on myself and my own coolness.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  That's a lovely message.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  I think that's, I think that's a good general message. Whether you're an individual, whether you're a brand, whether you're trying to like create something, like focus on people you care about, your community and on helping others, it will make you seem good. It will help those around you. And there's also lots of research, and this isn't my own work, that shows that, you know, doing things like helping others, spending money on others rather than yourself is one of the things that makes you happier. So you'll likely be happier too. Whereas if you're, you know, chasing coolness or other forms of status, that's a, I think a lot less likely to make you happy and it's less likely to benefit others too.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  That is Caleb Warren, professor of marketing from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  We mentioned a bunch of Caleb's studies in this episode. If you're curious to find out more, we will link to those in our show notes.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Now, next week, we are changing gears entirely. We're going to be doing an episode on obsessive compulsive disorder, and we're going to be focusing on a version of the disorder that doesn't get much attention, because it's really difficult for a lot of people to talk about. And that's because it has to do with taboo topics. Here's a preview.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  If you can be afraid of it, if it can bother you, you can get obsessed with it. And that's what makes this so difficult to talk about. It's easier to talk about being obsessed or being afraid of germs. It is less easy to talk about being afraid that you are a sexual deviant. Those things are so difficult to talk about, but it's the same kind of obsessive spiral.

• 26:49Speaker 05

  I had a pivotal moment at 12 where I experienced sexual abuse by a not immediate family member chronically. Because of the sexual abuse and not being believed, my brain then completely latched on to, what if I do not have a grasp on reality? What if I'm lying? What if I am a monster? Because I was then just, you know, told how horrible it was to accuse someone of these things that I then learned were sexual and whatever. And then, because I also like started becoming a babysitter to like earn money and get out of the house, like later in my teenagerhood, my brain latched on to, essentially, what if you're a pedophile? Like, what if you do the same things that happened to you? Which is actually an incredibly common theme for OCD that most people don't name, which is why I really love bringing that up, or I feel the need to bring it up in interviews like this,

• 27:32Speaker 05

  because there are so many people who have these intrusive thoughts that have no basis in reality. It's just the intrusive thought that every human has, actually, of just like these, the most blasphemous, random things, having this like intrusive image, or this, you know, what if I did this? Most people without OCD are like, ew, that's a weird thought, like moving on with my life. And because of the brain, people with OCD, they're like, oh, what does that mean about me? What if that means I secretly want to? What if I actually did do it? And I don't like, it could just go on and on forever.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  That is next week on All in the Mind. And that's it for the show this week. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr, senior producer James Bullen, and sound engineer Simon Branthwaite. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I will catch you next time.

• 28:36Speaker 06

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