It may not be on the epic Titanic scale, but a lot of marketing beliefs have sunk in this cool-hunting journey of ours (mapping people aged 14-34 years). Ease of rejection, expecting complete transparency, adoring iconic brands yet not owning them despite having the spending power, operating at either end of the spectrum … cool-folks have been changing every consumer paradigm that marketers work with and making them slog hard for their daily bread.

This time we cool-hunted on when these folks actively start considering a brand to buy or experience. In other words, we explored the qualities that make a brand enter the ‘consideration set' for people aged 14-34 years.

Though this was an open-ended probe, in our analysis we clubbed the responses that have been previously identified as factors that make a brand relevant as one with the intent of getting a grip on more pointers. This time we included a mini-metro alongside the three metros but the results were almost identical, indicating that perhaps cool folks in urban India have similar attitudes and dispositions.

While ‘relevance' (that encompasses responses such as my-kind-of-a-brand, generate empathy, iconic stature, transparency, and so on) was clearly ahead as the most significant factor for pushing a brand into the consideration set – we were slightly surprised to find ‘price' emerging as a relatively low catalyst – with just about 16 per cent of the respondents stating that it acts as a stimulant.

For the cool folks, ‘desire and arousal of need' was more important to consider a brand, after relevance. Even functionality got a low rating with just under one-fifth of the respondents stating ‘functionality and utility' to be the door-opener in the set of brands being considered.

Though this journey of cool hunting has made us shock-proof, we were still surprised to find ‘price' and ‘functionality and utility' featured significantly below ‘relevance' and ‘desire'.

Intrigued by these findings – we probed further into the approach and attitude to price in a qualitative research. We were surprised to discover that for a majority of the respondents price, if at all it kicked in as a factor, did so much later.

Scenting a new finding, we did a random check on the awareness of brands' prices, those they were considering owning in the near future. There is low awareness on the price per se among the cool folks; what there is is a perception-based price-wise hierarchy of brands. So they perceive a Sony to be more expensive than a LG or a Samsung (the reality could be different) and they perceive an Apple to be higher priced than a Samsung and tickets at PVR to be higher than those at a Big Cinemas – but it does not necessarily play on their mind while considering purchase. Clearly, something worth probing further. Happy cool-hunting!

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

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