What is your Brand's Cool Quotient?

I’m of the firm belief that every marketer thinks that his or her brand is COOL irrespective of the category, the product or the TG. But we all know that’s not true.
Some brands are and others just don’t have a clue.
So which brand is really cool and who ultimately determines what is cool? The trendsetters? The marketers?
What does it take for a product or category to position itself as the ultimate arbiter of cool?
Being as cool as I am, I’m going to go out and give you my hypothesis of ultimate coolness and then it is for you to judge your brand’s COOL QUOTIENT.
But I’m not going to attempt to define it. Because as soon as you think you have defined it, it just isn’t cool anymore! Cool is not an easily definable formula-if it was every brand would be trying to harness and replicate that formula.
One just has a perception of cool. It’s meaning and demeanor goes beyond words.
You can tell when a song is cool or not. You can look at ads and shoes and tell if they are happening. Over the years you can only hope to develop a sense of cool such that you know when you see it.

COOL IS ALLUSIVE:
Attempting to capture cool is a trap. It means everything and nothing at once. Cool is allusive, mysterious and indefinable, it’s meaning perpetually shifting to accommodate individual perceptions.
A throwaway word that was once used to merely describe an individual’s cultural status (he or she is cool) or an object’s worth (this phone is cool) has acquired new dimensions.
It has evolved from the fringes of the society to the mainstream.
A grandson finds his grandfather’s cane cool, teenager finds the packaging of her multi vitamin bottle cool, and father buys stocks in a company because his grandson says it’s cool.
A term securely nestled among the larger categories like cool SUVs, cool babes, and cool gadgets has now shifted to dominate our daily lives in ways we have yet to thoughtfully consider.

COOL IS REMOTE:
Cool is exclusive, the opposite of mass. It thrives on the attitude “If your neighbors are in on it, it can’t be cool”. It’s morphed into gadgets, technology, cars, person, music, or party accessible to few but coveted by many.
This is where the new trends of individual designs, customization and personalization is getting a foothold. The minute everyone has the same gadget, you have to admit that they are no cooler than the person around.

COOL IS ANTI-CONVENTIONAL:
Cool is like pretty much telling the world that you have decided to excuse yourself from the predictable and the traditional. But here in surfaces the contradictory nature of cool.
Coolness actually follows the conventional consumer cycle of new becoming quickly obsolete and retro the most valuable commodity.
Here is why the knick knacks and hand me downs sold in trendy, junky shops are oh -so –cool. They have managed to become cool by liberating themselves from the stigma of consumerism and the tyranny of brand new.

COOL IS DYNAMIC:
The term cool seems to have originated among jazz musicians in the 1940’s. But it was only legitimized and recognized as a potent phrase in the 1950’s. The post world war 2 era captured James Dean’s rebellious image in ‘Rebel without a cause’ as the ultimate epitome of cool. The flamboyant charade of toughness and authority, the brooding virility, the studied hip ness and the ‘don’t mess with me’ poutiness stayed for long as the ultimate symbol of cool.
And since then every decade has had it’s versions of cool. But what is relevant is that even though coolness varies between generations, there are constants upon which varying compositions are based. Like ‘hip’is constant whereas variables would be evolving fads and slang.Similarly the last version of cool does not affect the previous version-each version has a life of it’s own. No style will make another style wrong and that’s what makes it dynamic and brings me back to my first point- COOL IS ALLUSIVE. So how do you begin to nail it down?