Google Commissions Teen Study That Says Google Is Cool ⇥ qz.com

Corinne Purtill, Quartz:

Hey! Psst? Wanna know what the cool teens are thinking these days? What hip slang they use? What multinational brands they enjoy? Then check out “It’s Lit: A guide to what teens think is cool,” a research publication by the people you think of when you think of cool: the Brand Team for Consumer Apps at Google!

[…]

Teens’ absolute favorite brand — and this is a total coincidence that BTFCAAG has no choice but to pass along — is YouTube, a Google property. The third coolest is Google. The 10th coolest is Chrome, Google’s web browser. Google is the coolest multinational conglomerate subsidiary there is! You don’t even have to take Google’s word for it. They also have quotes from Real Teens. Like ‘Female, 17, from suburban Florida,’ who says: ‘Google is not only a powerful search engine, but great at everything it does, from email to documents.’ Way to stick it to the man, Gen Z!

No, really, do check this thing out (PDF). It’s an amazingly inept piece of PR bullshit. Want confirmation that it’s really, really bullshit? Here’s something I cribbed from page five of their report:

Teens are obsessed with shoes. Within the clothes/fashion/ beauty category almost 30% of the responses of what is cool were ‘shoes.’ To Gen Z, the top 3 coolest shoe brands are Jordan, Converse, and Vans.

Anybody who knows anything about sneakers will be aware that 2016 was the year of Adidas. For the first time in over a decade, a non-Nike brand topped NPD Group’s best-selling chart thanks to the Adidas Superstar. Meanwhile, the various Ultraboost, NMD, and Yeezy models Adidas released in 2016 were easily the hottest sneakers of the year.

Meanwhile, Google’s Brand Team allegedly found that Sunglass Hut is cooler among teens than Vice, and that the Doritos brand is slightly cooler than Amazon, but way cooler than Spotify.