As a youngster, Adam Ferrier got a schoolyard lesson in what is and what isn’t cool. After winning the Western Australian under-12 chess championship, he eagerly informed his friends about his big achievement. The response was predictable: Not only is chess not cool, but bragging about it is even worse. That early awareness that he was, in fact, not cool spawned a lifelong obsession with what makes people and brands deserving of the epithet. Ferrier, who was a strategic planner for Saatchi & Saatchi before becoming a consumer psychologist and partner at Naked Communications in Sydney, Australia, earned his masters in clinical psychology with a thesis titled, “Identifying the Underlying Personality Constructs of Cool People.” FuelNet spoke with Ferrier about the importance of companies making — and keeping — their brands cool as part of a brand positioning strategy.

FuelNet: Does the same thing that makes a person cool also make a brand cool?

Ferrier: One of the reasons I did the thesis is I realized that cool is omnipresent in popular culture. Everything is described as cool, whether it’s a hotel, a brand, a car or a person. The similarity with these things is that it takes a cool person to say something is cool before it becomes cool. If no cool person says something is cool, then it’s not. Cool is actually a property that doesn’t exist within any kind of object. It only exists within people, and as soon as cool people say something is cool, then it becomes cool.

FuelNet: It’s all about perception?

Ferrier: It’s all about endorsement. The classic case study is Levi’s, who in the 1980s had their 501s and were sitting back on their laurels thinking, hey, we’ve created the ultimate cool pair of jeans. But what they didn’t realize is there was nothing inherently cool about the jeans. It was only the fact that they were attracting cool people to the jeans that made them cool.

FuelNet: Knowing that, what can companies do to reach these cool people and build customer loyalty for brand?

Ferrier: If a brand wants to appear to be cool, then it has to try and find cool people, understand what makes them tick, and make sure that their brand values have something that resonates with those cool people.

FuelNet: How do brand strategy experts do that?

Ferrier:In my thesis and the subsequent research we’ve done at Naked Communications, we examined cool people and looked at their underlying values. We found there are five things that make people cool: self-belief and confidence, defying convention, understated achievement, caring for others, and energy and sociability. If they’re the values that make somebody cool, then find out what your brand can offer people who have those kinds of values at their core. If your brand is all about being very overt and over the top, you don’t necessarily want to become understated straightaway because that’s not in line with what your brand is about. But you might want to find out how your brand can tap into the values of cool people and have something that’s relevant and motivating to them.

FuelNet: Is having a cool pitchman an effective brand communication strategy?

Ferrier: There are a whole lot of ways for brands to establish their coolness. Perhaps the easiest way is to buy the endorsement of a cool person. Pay them to endorse your brand, and then your brand will become cool by association. The problem is that as soon as that person stops endorsing your brand, or as soon as that person stops being cool, then your brand stops being cool. It’s the same as a really uncool person buying what is perceived as the latest cool brand. They can try and buy their way into cool by association, but it’s pretty fragile ground on which to build a cool persona, or build a cool brand.

FuelNet: You’ve written about how the notion of cool is global. What does that mean?

Ferrier: If you go to a cool hotel in Miami, London, Australia, Tokyo or Bangkok, it will have very similar traits. If you go into a mainstream hotel for the masses in those markets, it’s going to be extremely different and much more culturally sensitive.

FuelNet: You also discovered there’s a big difference in the perception of cool between men and women?

Ferrier: To men, cool people are nearly always men, whereas to women, cool people are 50-50 male and female. The implication is that if you want to make your brand cool, it would have to err on the side of having more masculine traits than feminine traits. The common expression of that is an androgynous brand, or a brand without sexuality. And the classic example is CK One, by Calvin Klein. If you look at a bottle of it, you’ll find that it’s not really androgynous, it’s actually quite a masculine-looking bottle. It has just been stripped of all feminine cues.

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