Have been thinking a lot about lifestyle marketing lately, which is why I wrote that thing on consumerism a couple posts back here… To me it seems like lifestyle marketing is kind of the lifeblood of the modern consumerist technocracy in which we’re living: it is the science of studying people, examining their behavioral patterns, and then creating product lines which speak to those patterns and which seem to address needs or interests of demographic groups.

The thing about it is that those trends are always changing, with sub-cultures constantly spawning off of main-forks: so you have this heavy research element, composed - at least partly - of “coolhunters”, a nineties term for people who basically act as informants for the lifestyle technocracy marketing machine.

Wikipedia’s entry has a couple worthwhile paragraphs to lift for my purposes. The thing I’m looking at, partly, has to do with big companies and advertising execs being so in their own world and headspace that they have to hire people who are in the know, who are in the field to actually bring them back actionable data about what the man on the street really thinks, says, acts or dresses. So you have levels of how that works, from marketing firms {See also: “infiltration marketing” on this site} down to “undercover” coolhunters:

A coolhunting firm is a marketing agency whose exclusive purpose is to conduct research of the youth demographic in the areas listed above. They then compile their data and produce reports detailing emerging and declining trends in youth culture as well as predictions for future trends. These reports are then sold to various companies whose products target the youth demographic.

And this is golden:

Coolhunters will often seek out individuals from within their target demographic who are regarded as leaders or trendsetters. They will then hire these individuals to be undercover coolhunters, who gather information secretly among their peers and report their findings back to their employers. This is a popular method of coolhunting as it provides insight into their target demographic within their natural environment.

The whole thing about this that wigs me out, I think, is the sort of weirdo secret element of the whole thing, where you literally become a corporate intelligence asset informing on those around you… Even if the end result is something so seemingly benign as “selling people products & services they actually need” (which is almost always debatable), does that necessarily make it okay?