While reading John Leland’s Hip: The History, I was struck with how hip is, at times, connected to the backbone of marketing.
It can be argued that the Product Life Cycle we were taught is old school and the nu skool product life cycle should eschew the Innovator, Early Adopter, Early/Late Majority mindset and instead ... redraw the Life Cycle curve beginning with the HIP evolving to the TRENDY growing to the MAINSTREAM and then milking the YESTERDAY.
HIP > TRENDY > MAINSTREAM > YESTERDAY as the nu skool Product Life Cycle ... hmm. At least this is one idea I had while reading the introductory chapter to HIP: The History. [Click here to read an excerpt from the intro chapter (NY Times reg. req'd).]
To get you hip to HIP: The History, I’ve extracted a few poignant paragraphs that relate more to the sociology of marketing than to the sociology of 'Hip.' Enjoy.
Hip as an agent of commodification …
“If hip is a form of rebellion – or at least a show of rebellion – it should want something. Its desires are America’s other appetite, not for wealth but for autonomy. It is a common folk’s grab at rich folk’s freedom – the purest form of which is freedom from the demands of money. It is an equalizer, available to outsiders as to insiders. Anyone can be hip, even if everyone can’t.”
Hip as an agent of reward …
“In a nation that does not believe in delayed gratification, hip is an instant payoff. You may need years of sacrifice to get to heaven or build a retirement fund, but hip yields its fruit on contact. It is always new but never going anywhere special – a present tense reclaimed from the demands of past and future.”
Hip as a marketing change agent …
“Hip sells cars, soda, snowboards, skateboards, computers, type fonts, booze cigarettes, CDs, shoes, shades, and home accessories. As Lord Buckley suggested, it serves the treasury well. By bringing constant change and obsolescence, it creates ever-new needs to buy. Though it grabs ideas from the bottom of the economic ladder, hip lives in luxury. Poor societies worry about growing enough corn; rich societies can worry about being corny. Hip shapes how we drive, whom we admire, whose warmth we yearn for in the night. Its sect transforms neighborhoods from forbidding to unaffordable.”
Hip as an agent of social marketing democracy …
“Hip is a social relation. You cannot be hip in the way you might be tall, handsome, gawky, nearsighted or Russian. Like camp, its unruly nephew, it requires and audience. Even at its most subterranean, it exists in public view, its parameters defined by the people watching it. You decide what is hip and what is not. Hip requires a transaction, an acknowledgement. If a tree falls in the forest and no one notices its fundamental dopeness, it is not hip.”
Hip as an edgecrafting agent …
“Hip brings the intelligence of troublemakers and outsiders into the loop, saving the mainstream from its own limits. What’s in Williamsburg [in Brooklyn] today will be in the mall tomorrow; today’s Vice magazine or Lucha Libre Mexican wrestling is tomorrow’s Good Housekeeping or SmackDown. Like the advertising world that grew up alongside it, hip creates value through image and style. In its emphasis on being watched, it anticipated the modern mediascape, which values people not for what they produce or possess but for their salience as images. For all its professed disregard for wealth, hip would not have thrived unless it was turning a profit.”
For more on HIP: The History, visit:
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