The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy

by Steve Stoute

Somehow this homegrown music resonated across racial and socioeconomic lines and provided a cultural connection based on common experiences and values, and in turn it revealed a generationally shared mental complexion.

This translation—a convergence between two entities from totally dissimilar, distinct cultural galaxies—was a foreshadowing of greater magic still to come.

Try telling your parents that you make your living by translating cultural cues to Fortune 500 companies and helping them communicate more effectively with consumers.

In a time of economic upheaval the likes of which we’ve been living through in recent years, marketers’ connecting meaningfully to the new young consumer—the single most powerful purchasing force ever measured, who is currently driving the global marketplace—is a life-and-death brand survival act.

No, not in sending messages to be crammed down the throats of consumers, but in extending an invitation, communicating it with nuance and cool. Others have pointed out, and I agree, that marketing must evolve beyond the monologue, to dialogue and to megalogue. No longer can advertising lecture or dictate to customers; interaction and exchange are vital. Add to that the social networking media and technology that the millennials have understood since nursery school, and it means that marketing to the group conversation—the megalogue—must be seamlessly incorporated.

Most cultural movements that go on to have staying power begin in the grass roots. They may appear to come about by accident and more or less spontaneously. But more often than not there is an underlying need that summons the energy required to build a movement.

Hip hop? There it was. For most of us this was the first general public outing of the hybrid word. People disagree about who exactly coined the term but most sources cite Lovebug Starski as the DJ/MC who, in the early seventies, started referring to the house party scene as cultivating a hip-hop culture.

So the question of who invented hip-hop is in order. But the question to ask first should not be who so much as what invented this culture. And that answer, easily, bluntly, is the force of aspiration.

It’s the power that turns nothing into something, that creates worlds and paves destinies, and changes the have-nots into the have-somes and occasionally the have-it-alls. Without it, I should add, the field of marketing would become obsolete.

Aspiration. It’s a mix of desire, hope, imagination, creativity, fearlessness, and a few other ingredients, among which last but not least is belief—specifically, a belief that whatever it ...

As a publicist, Bill Adler was way ahead of the curve in recognizing the mainstream marketing potential for rap artists.

As I thought about it more, the realization helped me see how the unapologetic hip-hop mind-set—which had started to become much more vivid in the music and the culture in the mid-to late 1980s and early ’90s—had given tanning a turbocharge.

One reason I believe hip-hop was able to grow from a small niche market (seen as a subgenre of black music at the record companies) to a full-blown dominant musical force and industry—a mainstay of popular culture capable of impacting the worldwide economy—is that it began in the bedrock of hard times. With that as a draw pulling in everyone, the color lines dropped, and there was a common language and attitude to share that created a sense of unity, of community.

Making something old new, vital, and relevant again—by putting an original spin on it—is a power of the hip-hop consumer too few companies recognize.

The lesson to be noted and never forgotten for anyone in the entertainment industry or in corporate marketing is that in advancing the genre musically to gain greater popularity, Run-DMC and LL Cool J never had to mortgage their image or the unapologetic values inherent in the culture.

What people would get for over a hundred bucks a pair was another kind of uplift, a way to convey status, to touch Jordan’s greatness via brand alignment. Or, as Phil Knight would say, he wasn’t selling sneakers at all; rather, he was selling dreams.

Credibility in the pop culture marketplace is everything. It’s a lesson worth underlining—credibility is everything.

Daring, dreaming, and doing became my threefold mantra early on, and it would serve me well at every stage of my career.

Everything about the evolution of the campaign was visionary—with most of the credit for that going to Darryl Cobbin, whom I greatly admire for his marketing pedigree.

Without calling it as much, this was a go-for-broke strategy known in marketing campaign terms as total disruption. The approach breaks all the rules of branding, authenticity, and consumer preferences. When introducing a new or reinvented brand, it is the kind of tactic that will make you or break you. Kamikaze marketing!

What made you decide to leave the record business?” That was the question asked of me by a lot of different people—especially in the early days of my first testing the waters in the advertising world. Sometimes I would try to explain my interest in how all the tanning and code-shifting had taken place by answering, “Cultural curiosity!”

Gen X and Gen Y youth and adults who came of age in the late eighties and nineties, or the Now and Next teens coming of age—these savvy consumer millennials are marketing veterans. They have been marketed to—directly and indirectly—since birth and through their parents, giving rise to an extraordinarily aware and often cynical audience. Belief, therefore, is granted only by experience. They want attention and need a certain level of scarcity.

While we already knew that those with a youth mind-set have a more profound relationship to technology than other consumers, we wanted to provide an overview of passion points for youth culture that were going to be valuable in our strategies. By no means comprehensive, the list includes: music, sports, entertainment, gaming, fashion/beauty, style/ design, creativity and self-expression, social connections (real and virtual), the Internet, and, again, technology.

Not surprisingly, brands that make and market technology live or die depending on their fluency with youth culture and on their proximity to cool.

The whole power of viral is that it is spontaneous, authentic, and consumer driven.

On a wide screen the story was, as we at Translation later liked to say, “It’s not the iPod, it’s the iProcess.” That is to say that products are not what sells; an understanding of culture is what sells.

It may be a Swatch watch, as a classic example, that is a reflection of who you are. It says, When I have X brand, people feel about me in Y way, and it shows my level of success.

In all of the HP marketing, what made the technology appealing and what made it matter was that it was part of culture. With the iPod skins and the Harajuku camera we were starting our relationship with the brand by instigating instant cool. Such efforts are aimed at pushing a brand to the top of the cool hill, whereas the next phase of work aims at perpetual cool, and finally a third stage, to prolong activation forever and ever, is about embodying cool.

As we’ve seen at every stop of tanning, cool is not a given evolutionary principle but something that can happen instantly, with profound implications for brand success. And once you’re there, you’re there. That is, until they decide you are gone. Perpetual cool, therefore, requires long-term commitment—the kind that a brand such as Nike epitomizes. It’s all about being vigilant in staving off the slide toward being “over,” a constant fight against inertia. Perpetual cool demands focus, investment, and frequent refreshing via innovation. The strategy phase of embodying cool is about a full translation when a brand has successfully earned respect and loyalty from the consumer and has received permission to also be cool.

The stages for consumer brand perception that span a relationship beginning as functional and evolving into emotional are Convenience, Consideration, Respect, Like, Love, in that particular order.

The job of the translator, as a rule in the new economy, is to find the sweet spot between the brand’s core values and the cultural cues.

There is nothing wrong with playing into a trend. But a word of warning to marketers : If you don’t have control and you’re not at the forefront of seeing the trend, you’re in the back getting killed. Trend really can be a Ponzi scheme. When everyone moves on and you as the brand are the last guy to get the memo, you’ll be chasing the last dollar and there won’t be anything left.

“Trends are perishable, cool is forever.”

Brand journalism suggests that there is a continual flow of news and information that is consumer generated and needs to be followed.

What was getting lost in translation (phrase intended) was that defining what’s cool is less about the specific style of shirt and more about how wearing the style of shirt makes you feel.

According to John, “Everyone defines themselves by the music they grew up with. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are. If you grew up in 1995 and you looked at seven of the top ten singles, you were defined by hip-hop. And that’s it, that’s your reference point.”

Digital campaigns are mounted on claims that a site gets millions/billions of hits. But how many coming to that site are paying attention and how often does that translate into sales? As I would later tell clients, by buying focus, we can avoid being in the empty-eyeball business.

It was that moment when I gave it to him and Lagerfeld’s eyes got big as he looked at it—as if to say, “Damn!”—that I realized those six degrees of separation are really more like two. What is the separation? The difference is between those who aspire and those who don’t.

Is this conversation between marketer and consumer—via the strobe of pop culture—about a product or a mind-set? Indeed, it’s about both.

It’s a reminder that, as much as aspiration drives culture, it is oppression that breeds resourcefulness—which in turn breeds empowerment, economic, social, and political.

including The Audacity to Win by campaign manager David Plouffe,

David Plouffe for The Audacity to Win