In hot pursuit of cool.

Malcolm Gladwell coined the phrase, "coolhunter" to describe the people who scour the world to discover what cool people are doing. The thinking goes that whatever cool people are doing will eventually appeal to everyone else who is not cool. It is a particularly appealing argument for youth brands and for brands who see themselves as cutting edge. However, cool is fickle, elusive and mercurial. It offers the paradox that an uncool person can not recognise cool and, when an uncool person does a cool thing, it actually ceases to be cool.

One critic of coolhunting claims that it "enshrines" the instinct of researchers more than any other kind of research. In other …