Adding cool to a brand that already has it is not the interesting problem.

distinction — attributed to Brian Feit

Feit keeps a list of brands he considers cool and pursues them deliberately, but he is candid that chasing an already-desirable name is not where the real work lives. It is difficult to make Prada cooler and not particularly interesting to try. The harder, more valuable problem is a brand like Tide or Colgate, where the budget is larger and an agency's cultural instincts can actually move a number that matters. Prestige-by-association is a different exercise from value creation, and mistaking one for the other means chasing brands rather than building outcomes.

For agencies choosing which clients to pursue based on prestige rather than actual impact.

brand-strategy, mass-market, cool-factor, value-creation