Brands are obsessed with appearing cool; therefore, they capture and mine youth

The finance sector needs to be restructured, 
with positive change coming from within.
Today’s politics are divisive, but there is one 
thing most people should be able to agree on: 
we need to stop the financial sector from making 
profits through shady deals that end up costing 
hardworking people their life savings and require 
governments to bail out major banks with 
taxpayer money.
If we want to be sure that we’re not walking into 
another crisis, we need to restore trust.
This means restructuring the financial sector in a 
way 
that 
removes 
the 
temptation 
for 
professionals to act in their own self-interest 
over their clients’.
One step in this direction would be to better 
separate the jobs in the financial system and 
make sure that positions like broker-dealer are 
no longer possible. This way, brokers would only 
be rewarded for negotiating successful deals 
between two parties, and would be prohibited 
from acting as dealers and arranging self-
serving financial transactions.
Another step would be to protect people’s 
savings deposits and keep them off-limits from 
banks and other financial trading institutions.
This would keep people’s life savings safe in the 
event of another major collapse, and would 
prevent banks from using their clients’ money as 
just another set of assets to include in their 
payments and trades. Also, it would give a 
bank’s greedy traders far less of other people’s 
money to play with, thereby reducing the 
likelihood they’d take on high-risk transactions.
But perhaps most important of all is to have 
proper ethical conduct be promoted from within 
the financial system.
Having the SEC threaten, and occasionally 
enforce, billion-dollar fines is clearly an 
ineffective way of promoting good behavior. 
Ethical business practices must be instilled from 
within the institutions themselves, by executives 
and leaders who set a good example and reward 
those who adhere to similarly ethical practices.
Obviously, this is easier said than done. But 
every transformation has to start somewhere.
No logo
Brands are obsessed with appearing cool; 
therefore, they capture and mine youth 
subcultures for their ideas.
A brand can succeed or die depending on 
whether or not it is considered cool. Companies 
therefore spend vast amounts every year trying 
to find out what is seen as cool and then 
incorporating this into their brand.
This fixation with coolness stems from the 
companies’ overreliance on the youth market to 
generate sales. In previous decades, baby-
boomers drove the consumer economy, but 
during the recession of the early 1990s they 
began to seek cheaper alternatives to high-end 
brands. This forced brands to find new 
customers, and so they turned towards the 
growing teenage population.
To properly target teenagers, companies 
analyzed youth cultures and incorporated the 
traits that were considered cool into their brand 
images. Aspects of traditionally alternative 
subcultures in music and fashion, such as punk 
and grunge, were appropriated by brands. Even 
rebellious characteristics like ‘retro’ and ‘irony’ 
were turned into marketable commodities.
Consider for example hip-hop and Black culture. 
The break out of hip-hop artists in the 1980s led 
to the style becoming popular with young people 
throughout society. Brands such as Nike and 
Tommy Hilfiger were able to ingratiate 
themselves into the movement by sponsoring 
artists and sports stars and engaging in 
aggressive marketing that pushed their image to 
center stage. The strategy was so massively 

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successful that brands now help to dictate the 
development of this subculture and directly 
influence which products are considered cool. 
Black culture and identity has been captured by 
the brands and transformed into a profit-
generating 
phenomenon, 
and 
Black 
communities are forced to follow where the 
brands lead.
Brands are obsessed with appearing cool; 
therefore, they capture and mine youth 
subcultures for their ideas.