Culture Spies

Jack Herrera 1/6/18

Culture Spies, why are they important? 

The first thing I asked myself when I read Culture Spy off my worksheet was, "What is that?" I had never heard of that word before. According to the video, "Making Cents out of Teens: Merchants of Cool" a culture spy is someone who looks into the "teen landscape" for trends and things that could potentially become the latest trend. They go look for trends and things that are "cool" where businesses can't go. The media connects a growing number of people to the latest trend. Someone with the name of Tom may ask, "What is the point of a culture spy?" Well Tom, culture spies go where businesses can't go. Teens are the biggest market in the world and culture spies try to obtain information that will help corporations approach this huge market. According to an article on pbs, teenagers spent $100 billion as well as influencing their parents to spend $50 billion. This makes them one of the biggest markets in the economy. If it wasn't for culture spies, businesses would have a very tough time learning how to approach this huge opportunity. However once culture spies find the latest trend, the trend kind of just dissolves and dies. Present day culture spies are lurking all around us, they target many trends, such as fortnite (which is kind of old but still). Businesses advertise through the people that play fortnite, one individual in particular is Ninja. Ninja has pretty big partnerships with Redbull and Samsung. I guarantee you if fortnite never blew up, Ninja would not have those partnerships. To sum this up culture spies are very important for businesses due to their knowledge of the biggest consumers in the world.