CoolBrands turns out to be the Mercury Music Awards of Branding

Once a year we get the proclamation from the CoolBrands Expert Council of judges as to which brands are considered to be the coolest and most ’of the moment’.

For a Branding Expert like myself, there are all manner of peculiar entries in the top 10. As anyone who owns an Aston Martin will tell you - they are lovely cars to look at, less lovely to own - being extreme gas guzzlers and supposedly spending large parts of their working lives in a garage workshop - there is an infinite number of cooler car brands than Aston Martin; I would suggest Audi as an example of an increasingly cool and innovative car manufacturer or of course 8th ranked Ferrari! Strange to see that Harley-Davidson has so much traction in the UK too? - Similar brand values to Aston Martin I suppose. Neither of these brands is particularly cutting edge or ’of the now’ - not being particularly big innovators, and relying more on perceived heritage.

Rolex is old-school but has not really been cool for a while now! Cool for watches is more likely Urwerk, Richard Mille or Greubel Forsey. What is dwindling smart messaging and business phone behemoth BlackBerry doing in the top 10??? Surely there has to be some correlation between cool and crashing share prices? These brands are largely clichéd and ubiquitous more than anything else. Much like the arbitrary left-field judging at the Mercury Music Awards - which are typically very far from the cutting edge of cool and current musical trends.

The top 10 makes for quite odd reading really:

1. Aston Martin
2. Apple
3. Harley-Davidson
4. Rolex
5. Bang & Olufsen
6. BlackBerry
7. Google
8. Ferrari
9. Nike
10. YouTube

I cannot see how anyone would pay this any serious attention - this reads more like a wishlist of your typical ill-informed wealthy Z-list celebrity - "I would like a gold Aston Martin to match my gold Rolex and gold Blackberry" - much like Katie Price overdoses on pink Range Rovers, Aston Martins and Rolexes no doubt. This would seem to be a wannabe celebrity checklist for the accessories of superficial stardom.

Is Nike really cooler than Adidas though? Aston Martin cooler than Ferrari? Google is great, but I’m not sure it’s truly cool. Ferrari keeps innovating and deserves a top 10 ranking, as does Bang & Olufsen and Apple, the latter named I certainly believe should currently be at the top. As soon will be seen with the iPhone 5 launch, few brands are quite as desirable as Apple is now - and that is surely one of the key essences of cool. I think logos and icons also play their part in the definition of cool; neither the BlackBerry nor Google logos could be said to be cool, but the Apple logo is so iconic - it requires no text! (same goes for Nike for that matter)

When we talk of brands and branding - Awareness, Values, Recognition and Recollection are for sure key criteria, but when the focus is on ’Cool’, the emphasis must be on the Associated Values of the brand. What do the brands themselves represent, who are their brand ambassadors? There’s not been a James Bond film for a while, and no new models either, or recent motorsport wins or accolades - why would the caché of Aston Martin then be that high right now?

For me, ’Cool’ is frequently a fleeting, momentary state / status - achieved at the pinnacle of popular acceptance - at least with the ’innovator’ demographic I suppose. Back in the 80’s Sony had the same caché that Apple has now, Apple is in some ways the new Sony. Other brands like ’Top Shop’ kind of oscillate between cool and clichéd - as most fashion brands tend to. Very few brands manage to sustain long-term coolness - and if they do, they need by necessity to be marginal brands - yet to feel the weight of public adulation. When something becomes truly mass-market, surely it looses some vestige of cool, as is likely to happen to Apple eventually. The Chinese restaurant fortune cookies started off as cool - when done by only a few enterprising restaurants, their popularity soon grew to ubiquitous levels, to where they were considered naff, and thus dropped by most establishments - these things are cyclical though, and they will rise in popularity again.

Almost by its own virtue really, once something is proclaimed to be cool - it no longer truly is!