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The Science of Successful Things: Online Marketing Essentials (Coolness, Cultishness, and Popularity), with Derek Thompson, Senior Editor, The Atlantic and Author, Hit Makers
Coolness
It’s an interesting question. What is coolness? And it’s sort of impossible to define, but sociologists have tried. And their definition, I think, is really useful. Their definition is that coolness is a measured positive rebellion against an illegitimate mainstream. And like thinking of that all in one big pile is a little bit complicated. But, when you disentangle it, it makes a lot of sense. It is a measured small rebellion, a little difference or distinction from mainstream that is considered illegitimate or bad. Coolness is a response to a mainstream. It is, in many ways, very similar to the sociological definition of a cult. A cult is also a measured rebellion to a mainstream that is considered illegitimate.
Maybe the best way to think about this definition is to think about it through the lens of dress codes for high schools. Lots of high schoolers, when they attend a school that has a dress code, they try to break from that code, but only in ways that are measured and positive. Right? So, the dress code says, you have to wear a coat with a tie and a button up shirt. Maybe they’ll undo the tie a bit or wear a hat or undo their button up shirt. They’ll have measured, measured rebellions to that illegitimate mainstream. But it’s not cool to go to school naked. It’s not cool to go to school dressed like some sort of weird superhero for Tuesday. That’s not a measured rebellion. That is outright rebellion. And that is not considered cool. So, you need to measured rebellion, number one.
But number two, the mainstream has to be considered illegitimate in the first place, in order for the action to be considered cool. So, in one study, these researchers did something really clever. They told a bunch of students who were departing from the mainstream dress code in various ways, they told them the dress code was initiated to honor a high school graduate who had died overseas in a war. Now, suddenly that dress code wasn’t illegitimate. It was a completely legitimate way for people to honor a fallen soldier. And fewer students considered departing from that dress code to be cool. So, it’s very important to think, when defining coolness, that you need two parts. First, you need to mainstream that is considered bad. People need to agree that the mainstream is bad. And two, you need the rebellion to be positive and measured. It can’t be crazy. It can’t be insane. And, when you have those two things together, you have cool.
Cultishness
The difference between that which we consider cool and that which we consider cultish, because they’re relatively similar things, they’re both departing from a mainstream, is essentially degree. That cults all designed around this idea that most human beings or most people in society don’t get you, or they don’t get this important thing. They’re not religious enough. They’re not thoughtful enough. They’re not environmental enough. That has to be sort of the first principle of that cult. We’re all part of cults. We’re all part of something. We all disagree with some aspect of mainstream social or political thought. But we reserve the word cult for essentially groups that are too far away from the mainstream to be considered a measured rebellion from it. And so, I think that’s exactly the right way to think about coolness versus cultishness is that, whether or not other people consider us cooler cultish essentially depends on whether they think that we are departing from that mainstream in a way that is measured and positive.
Popularity
I think that we have a terrible misconception about popularity. I think that often we define popularity in a majoritarian way. We say that, in order for something to be popular, most people have to like it. A majority of the population has to like it. But think about this. If a book sells one million copies in a year, it is a runaway bestseller, that, by definition, 99.5% of Americans did not buy. The biggest movie of 2016, Rogue One, the Star Wars film, made enough money for about 35 to 40% of American adults to have bought a ticket and seen it. That means the vast majority of Americans did not see the most popular movie. You could say the same for television. You could say the same for music. That lots of things that we consider popular are not majoritarily popular at all. They aren’t mainstream by this old fashioned definition. Instead, they are cults, that culture itself is cults from top to bottom. It is increasingly in this moment now where the mainstream has been completely shattered and it’s been totally niche-afide, that culture is cults all the way down.
And I think that, in thinking about this from a marketing standpoint, and you’re thinking about your total addressable market. Your total addressable market is not America. It’s not the world. It’s not any enormous group of people. Your total addressable market is probably really, really small. And, rather than go big with a general message that you hope is going to embrace everybody, rather embrace the idea that the mainstream is dead. That it’s all cults, and that you have to find your cult and hit them very, very clearly with a message that is cultish, that says you are special because the mainstream is wrong. It helps for that message to tell them not only who they are but who they’re not, how they are different, how they’re special, and how the vast majority of people, how the amorphous mainstream doesn’t get them.
I sometimes talk about this in terms of online marketing as the Tokyo example. I went to Tokyo two years ago. And a friend who was telling me about how awesome Tokyo is said, “There’s this bar that sells amazing Japanese whiskey and also vinyl records.” And I was like, “What a strange idea for a place to only sell vinyl records and whiskey.” And he said, “Yeah. It does sound weird. But remember that Tokyo is a Metro area of 35 million people. So, even if the store only applies to like 0.5% of the Tokyo metropolitan population, it’s still an incredibly popular store.” The internet is Tokyo. The internet is this infrastructure that is connecting billions and billions of people. And you don’t need to reach all of them all at once in order to make something that’s popular. In fact, it makes much more sense to try to reach 0.2%, 0.01% of them with a message that is really clear, and very specific, and very special, and understand that, even if I get this microscopic percentage of the total addressable market to love what I’m doing, that is popularity.