Be nice!

Relevance, oomph, affordability, aspiration, transparency – stuff that endears brands to this extremely vibrant group of people whom we call ‘cool’ (folks aged 14-34 years) has been mapped by our teams across five metros and mini-metros in various combinations. To borrow a line from Pink Floyd’s famous album The Wall, it’s been like walking on the thin ice of modern life!

While we have a high percentage of these folks wanting oomph, vibrancy and effervescence in the brand they’d like to prefer, the same audience would want transparency and affordability. Now some of our critics felt (and mind you we have some!) that this information is good but not good enough to work out brand stances. They demanded that we go the full circle in Cool Hunt and try and get acceptable stances like the one we had done on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Regular readers will recall that an extremely high percentage of respondents (57 per cent) wanted to know the brand’s position on contentious issues and its public conduct. While ‘any CSR activity’ was good enough for 11 per cent of our respondents, 22 per cent were influenced by those brands that engaged only in ‘meaningful’ CSR (‘CSR activity for a cause I espouse’). This time we took off from where we last left.

We went about probing what all connects with the cool folk at an emotional level that it allows affinity-building or gets the target audience to develop an affinity towards the brand. One must admit that this was a real tough one as our probes are open-ended and responses are classified post probe with the four most popular groups of responses making it to our next round and, that for us, defines the universe for the exercise. We realise that if we can map the affinity-driving attributes then we are facilitating creation of new alternatives for the marketers in terms of initiative-evaluation and even selecting communication routes.

Surprisingly ‘transparency’ reappeared in the top four listings at a high of almost 27 per cent of the respondents going for it. In our earlier probe for ‘factors that make a brand relevant’ to the cool folks ‘transparency’ had topped everything else. For it to re-appear in this cool hunt for actions that drive affinity was astonishing. However, the bigger surprise was ‘being nice’. (We included responses as ‘not too abrasive’ in communication or approach along with ‘friendly and caring’ in this sub-set.) It was rated as the largest affinity-driving attribute with 47 per cent of the respondents stating that as the primary driver of affinity.

‘The message that’s hidden behind these two responses is the one marketers need to be cautious about’ is how our psychologist on board reacted. She says it is a clear signal that one can’t deceive or be smart for the end user is demanding transparency while evaluating affability simultaneously – and that’s really a tough call. And as brands and their promoting entities have to necessarily put so much in public domain to be relevant, they need to ensure they come across as courteous, gentle, amiable, kind, genial and gracious simultaneously. Having said this let me reveal the biggest surprise of this edition of Cool Hunt: ‘Reasonably priced’ came in a poor fourth with just about 10 per cent of the respondents stating it to be an affinity builder!

(Giraj Sharma is an independent brand consultant and a compulsive cool hunter).