assignment 4

Assignment4 – Applying Netnography to Coolhunting

‘Coolhunter’ is the term used to describe the marketing professionals and/or researchers whose purpose is to identify trends in order to promote them back to the masses. This type of field work requires the visit to the sites where they believe cool resides, follow it, and bring it back to be used in product development and marketing communications. By extension, the spread of market ideas can be tracked via social media data.

Review last week assigned article about coolhunting:

Pham, Lieu Thi (2009). “One Step Ahead: The ‘Coolhunting’ Phenomenon.” Screen Education. Issue 54, p. 88-92.*

*Available through the Bell Library, digital databases.

The assignment consists in two parts:

  • Identify what is trending now. In order to accomplish this, conduct research on social media using netnography. First, review the material on “Ethnographic Research” p. 284-285 on your textbook. Then, follow the netnography procedure below.
  • Prepare a brief report, incorporating the answer to the following questions and a summary of the most important insights found.
  • What social media/online venues provided relevant information to your coolhunting?
  • To what consumer groups your cool finding(s) would apply? Describe its characteristics, behaviors and/or language. Feel free to list the characteristics using bullets. (If needed, please review the segmentation bases from week2).
  • Provide a summary of your cool findings, including a link, sentence, word or image that illustrate each finding. Again, feel free to present your findings using bullets.

Netnography Procedure

  • Data collection. Select material posted to social media and create a journal of observations and reflections. (According to some scholars, the key to coolhunting is to look for cool people first and cool things later. Since cool things are always changing, cool people on the other hand are a constant).
  • Data interpretation. Identify the product/service/experience categories (e.g. mobile devices) emerged from the data.

Report the results in section II.

Format

  • The minimum number of pages is 2 and the maximum number is 3, not including references.
  • Please use Times New Roman font, 12 pt.
  • Be precise, concise and to the point.
  • Your assignment should be submitted via Blackboard-Assignment/Projects tab.