Is your brand uncool, niche cool or mass cool?

About the 10 characteristics of brand coolness and its consequences.

“Brand Purpose” and “Love Brand” have been famous buzzwords in the agency world in recent years. In 2020 in the course of the Corona crisis “Brand Purpose” was getting even more popular. But what about brand coolness? And is it actually important to be “cool” as a brand? And if so, does this insight actually help me as a brand owner to know about it? Are there different types or levels of brand coolness?

I recently came across the article “Brand Coolness” by Warren et al. published 2019 in the top journal “Journal of Marketing” which deals with these topics and which I would like to summarize and comment on here in hopefully simpler terms. Since this article should not claim to be a scientific text, I will forego quotations for better readability. If you are interested in details, I recommend you to read the original article:

Caleb Warren, Rajeev Batra, Sandra Maria Correia Loureiro, and Richard P. Bagozzi, “Brand Coolness,” Journal of Marketing, 83 (September). Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022242919857698

A short excursus

In marketing practice, the Journal of Marketing is perhaps known to one or the other, but from my experience, practitioners rarely read scientific journals. And I can not exclude myself from this behavior. Scientific findings are often difficult to read and grasp, but they contain interesting and helpful findings — also for companies and agencies. The paper which I am talking about in this text was a finalist in the Shelby D.Hunt / Harold H. Maynard Award, which shows that it is considered as highly relevant content in academia.

Another indication of relevance is that the paper was published in the Journal of Marketing. Alongside, for example, “Marketing Science”, “Journal of Marketing Research” and “Journal of Consumer Research”, it is one of the most renowned and important journals in the domain of marketing research. The holy grail, so to speak, in which every scientist in marketing wants to publish once. Content of high relevance for marketing science can therefore also be of interest to marketing practice. A good reason to take a look at these journals more often.

Back to topic

The researchers Caleb Warren, Rajeev Batra, Sandra Maria Correia Loureiro and Richard P. Bagozzi (including University of Arizona, University of Michigan) examine four central research questions in their article, which I will now briefly summarize and comment on.

Research Question 1: “What characteristics are prototypical of cool brands?”

Whether a brand is cool or not can be found out quite easily by asking directly for it. But then you still don’t know why a brand is cool — or in other words: which are the (more tangible) characteristics that make it cool. This is the level of detail the researchers wanted to address in their paper.

The authors define coolness as “ a subjective and dynamic, socially constructed positive trait attributed to cultural objects inferred to be appropriately autonomous”. With the help of a grounded theory approach**, based on three qualitative studies (focus groups, depth interviews, and essays with consumers from North America and Europe), they have identified 10 central characteristics that assemble brand coolness:

A cool brand is extraordinary, aesthetically appealing, energetic, high status, rebellious, original, authentic, subcultural, iconic, and popular.

** Grounded theory describes a social science approach in which a theory is generated from mostly qualitatively available data (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory)

Figure 1: Ten characteristics of brand coolness (Warren et al., 2019)

According to the authors, the extent to which these properties are present in a brand also depend on whether a brand is niche cool or mass cool (but more on this later).

The first thing I would think as a marketing practitioner would be: These characteristics are trivial. Why does it take extensive research to discover this? We practitioners tend to take our opinions or rough heuristics as our main working basis. Often we have no other choice due to time pressure and a lack of resources. All the better if we can now fall back on scientific findings for such questions.

In case it is important to a marketing manager that his brand is seen as cool, s/he can now use these 10 characteristics to better assess whether coolness is already the case and, if not, which levers need to be turned in order to improve. In particular, this knowledge can also help to create a common understanding of the goals of a project in agency briefings. We are able to define more explicitly which of the 10 characteristics should be considered in order to create or promote brand coolness, when working on future campaigns or digital services.

Anyone wondering whether it really matters whether a brand is cool or not? Just have a little patience, this will be answered with research question 4 later on. Prior to that we have to think about how to measure the status quo of a brand regarding brand coolness. Research question 2 provides a concept on how to do this.

Research Question 2: “Can we develop a validated instrument to measure the component characteristics of cool brands?”

The short answer to the research question: Yes, they can :-)!

The longer answer: On the basis of extensive research in literature and a total of eight different empirical surveys, they developed and validated a questionnaire that measures the 10 characteristics of brand coolness. Test subjects have to evaluate a brand based on 36 survey items, each on a 5-point scale from “disagree” to “agree”. For each characteristic the questionnaire contains between two and four questions.

Figure 2: Questionnaire items for measuring brand coolness (Warren et al., 2019)

Is this questionnaire a valid concept to measure brand coolness and its characteristics? The researchers tested this with four empirical surveys. Test subjects answered the questionnaire each for a cool brand and an uncool brand (each chosen by the test person). The ratings of the items were consistently significantly higher for cool brands than for uncool brands. Hence, the developed questionnaire is valid to identify cool brands.

Now one could criticize various points:

1. Extent of the questionnaire: 36 survey items are very extensive and, thus, the validity of the answers may gradually decrease during the survey.
2. Incentive-compatibility: It is a common challenge to develop surveys in a way that they are “incentive-compatible”, which means that respondents are motivated to give honest answers.
3. Representativeness: The sample-sizes of the test surveys were small (148–582 respondents), so representativeness may be questioned.
4. Generalizability: The data was collected either in Portugal or in the USA, depending on the survey. It has therefore not been proven whether the results can be transferred to other countries, continents or cultures.

However, small sample size and generalizability are points of criticism that are existent in many scientific studies, so these would absolutely not be a knockout criterion for me.

The first two points of critique may be addressed by working with a market research company which provides a panel of motivated respondents. A potential alternative to surveys could be a computer-aided screening of online word-of-mouth (tests, amazon reviews, newsgroups, etc.) for the 10 characteristics or associated words. Natural language processing may help to convert this to data which can be analyzed.

Research Question 3: “What are the consequences of brand coolness?”

Now we come to the research question that answers us if it is worth knowing whether a brand is cool or not. Besides analyzing the characteristics the researchers also examined if brand coolness is related to other valuable brand-related outcomes. Based on their data, they came to the conclusion that brand coolness shows a significant positive correlation with the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a brand, self-brand connection (SBC), brand love, brand attitude and the WOM probability for a brand.

In other words, the cooler you rate a brand, the

• more you are willing to pay for it (WTP)
• more you feel personally connected to a brand and possibly also express yourself through it (self-brand connection)
• more you feel some kind of love for a brand (brand love)
• greater is the positive attitude or disposition towards a brand (brand attitude)
• higher is the probability that you would like to talk to other people about this brand (WOM)

In addition to the above, also connections with other brand- related outcomes were investigated (e.g. satisfaction, pride), but the researchers did not investigate significant correlations throughout all data sets.

What does this mean now? If you know how your own brand performs in terms of brand coolness and its 10 characteristics, you can identify which levers to adjust in order to increase WTP, SBC, brand love, brand attitude and WOM.

Of course, these are results from studies with relatively small data sets and no long-term surveys have been conducted so far. From market to market and product to product, the relationships may differ or may not exist. To generalize these findings, courageous and interested companies are needed, which continuously measure the brand coolness of their brands, adjust the levers and examine if outcomes improve. Potentially, measuring brand coolness could become a product for market research companies, just like Yougov’s Brand Index.

Research Question 4: “How do the characteristics and consequences of coolness change as brands move from niche cool to mass cool?”

Earlier I mentioned that the researchers differentiate between “two levels of brand coolness”: Niche Cool Brands and Mass Cool Brands. Here, they refer to earlier research done by one of the two lead authors, Caleb Warren.

How they define these two levels in the “Life Cycle of Brand Coolness” is actually obvious, but I will briefly summarize it:

• Level 0 — Uncool brands: Brands which never became cool or lost their coolness with the result of being normal or undifferentiated from other brands.
• Level 1 — Niche cool brands: Brands that are viewed as cool by a smaller group, usually subcultures and are still rather unknown to the “mainstream consumer”. Respective subcultures perceive such brands as more original, authentic, rebellious, exceptional, and aesthetically appealing than other brands.
• Level 2 — Mass cool brands: Brands that are considered cool by the general public. Such brands are perceived as more popular and iconic than other brands.

Figure 3: Life cycle of brand coolness (Warren et al., 2019)

“Life Cycle of Brand Coolness” already signals that the process forms a chronology and, in the worst case, a cycle. An uncool brand can be adopted by a subculture because of its valuable product, clever marketing or just by luck and thus become a niche cool brand. The more it is accepted by the general public, the more it develops into a mass cool brand. Over time it can of course also happen that even the mainstream consumer perceives the brand as normal or hardly differentiated from other brands. Then the descent into the league of uncool brands is initiated.

The questionnaire presented by Warren et al. helps to continuously measure the 10 characteristics of brand coolness in order to recognize changes and identify the position in the “Life Cycle of Brand Coolness”. Based on the results, marketing practitioners are able to react in time with appropriate marketing activities and fight against getting uncool.

My conclusion

The results of the research paper help us to understand brand coolness in detail and to identify levers that can be adjusted (e.g. through marketing activities) in order to create, maintain or promote brand coolness. The questionnaire for measuring the 10 characteristics provides a valid tool to identify the status quo of a brand and where there is potential for improvement. To know about brand coolness is important, since it significantly influences, for example, WTP, WOM and brand love. A continuous measurement via periodical surveys is of course time-consuming. But it always pays off when you can fall back on quantitative results instead of solely relying on your own gut feeling or expert knowledge. Knowing which levers to adjust can improve the efficiency in working with agencies and service providers, since it helps to create a stringent common understanding of a marketing activities goal much faster.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-brand-uncool-niche-cool-mass-dr-christian-messerschmidt/