OK, so you’ve got this product that you need to market this so that it’s ‘cool’, so that it takes off like all those other hip items that you just had to have, the iPad, iPod, tablet, etc.. I mean look at the iPod, it’s just a music player, yet for a time everybody had to have one, it became de rigueur to the max. And then you look at that Steve Jobs fellow and you think, yeah he’s got it. Went up against the might of Microsoft with a closed operating system, with a box that continues to be twice as expensive as anything else and yet he’s making a killing.
So you’re looking at your marketing guys and you’re thinking, maybe I should dress them up in some naff looking skivvy or polo neck jumper (in black, of course) like Jobs. But you know that won’t work. So, you realize you need to hire someone a little different, someone with an edge, someone like…an authentic hipster - to infuse a counter culture in your marketing department.
Here’s the first lesson of being hip, or a hipster if you must: it means going against the current trend, it means being self-consciously anti- whatever it is that’s happening.
When they asked James Dean what he was rebelling against he replied ‘What have you got?’
That means, paradoxically, whoever’s a hipster today ain’t gonna be tomorrow. Gonna be hard to write that wanted ad isn’t it? A hipster, according to some sources, is someone who is young, middle-class with interests in non-mainstream styles, tastes and behaviors. And hiring one is a very conscious choice: they’re going to be wearing clothes that were in fashion fifty years ago, glasses you once wouldn’t be seen dead in, and with tastes that are intentionally obscure (if everyone’s into it then it’s no longer hip). But, get this, they know it’s uncool – there’s this complicity – like it’s really bad taste, and we know that, ha ha!
I think that in a society that’s increasingly homogenized, marketed to the point of saturation, largely in agreement with its own values and tastes, the hipster credo becomes a necessary antidote. It’s no surprise that these people came into being around the 1950′s, after we had won the war and saw a wave of prosperity that seemed to promise everything and in the end seemed empty, devoid of meaning and delivered nothing. We’re looking for something real to fill that void, and if we can’t find it at least we’ll look cool disparaging everything else.
The hipster credo becomes a necessary antidote
Anyway here are your tips for hipster startup employees:
You definitely need a hipster. You need someone who’s going to be the absolute early adopter with the (potentially) current trend in consumer products; all those endless gadgets we think we have to have now; your hipster will tell you what we need tomorrow. (As he would have already cracked open the products to dissect it’s inside) Whatever product you’re creating should be different then the current trend: think miniature (like wristwatch) HD TV or social networking site where you never actually connect with anyone else or where the goal is to be really unpopular (except with the other really unpopular people). It must be simple yet technologically of-the-moment: these people aren’t entirely vapid and foolish, particularly when it comes to shiny accessories.
It’s a style thing, but there’ll be no particular style which you can point at. Rather they’ll have adopted whatever countercultural style has existed for the past 50 years while at the same time discarding whatever it stood for. Who is Che Guevara anyway – a t-shirt manufacturer? What does punk and grunge mean in an age when you can record, in perfect digital fidelity, noise?
Don’t expect too much work from your hipster employee. In fact, I wouldn’t even set up that cubicle. You want them out and about in the world soaking up fashion and trends so that they can reject them in a humorous and ironic fashion. This is where you need to take note. Call them in once a year: carefully examine what they’re wearing, using and doing. Don’t listen to them just take note of the main elements of their ‘style’. Move fast and base your product on this analysis. And then hire another hipster – cause after that they’ll be hopelessly out of the loop. [I am kidding about the don't expect too much work from them. The idea is that they will work, and hard for that matter, but WON'T punch in 9-5pm. They are going to work when they want. So let them]
Anyway, in all this, the bottom line is that a hipster is someone who can bring a dynamic perspective to your team. Their counterculteral views can be a the magical potion you need to take the market by storm.
