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And Finally Business News Digital
Kids think Google is just the coolest
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 4 April 2017
Yo daddy-o! A new study of teenagers has found that Google and several of its associated brands are super cool. Cooler than anything else out there. Cooler than Netflix. Cooler than Nike. Cooler than McDonalds. And certainly a hell of a lot cooler than Yahoo. That this research was carried out by Google is irrelevant.
For the report, titled ‘It’s Lit: A Guide To What Teens Think Is Cool’, over 1000 thirteen to seventeen year olds in the US were asked about their awareness of certain brands and how cool they deemed them to be. YouTube came in at number one, as the very coolest brand out there right now, which will no doubt please everyone in the music industry. Netflix is number two, followed closely by Google itself. A similar group of eighteen to 24 year olds asked also agree with this top three.
Google’s Chrome web browser is the tenth coolest brand, according to the teenagers. They like Chrome more than Snapchat. More than Instagram. More than Facebook. More than Coca-Cola. More than Disney. Certainly more than Yahoo. And it’s very much cooler than Vice, which is only slightly less uncool than the least cool brand, The Wall Street Journal.
One super cool seventeen year old told the researchers: “Google is really cool because it is an innovator. A trend setter. Google is not only a powerful search engine, but great at everything it does, from email to documents. Google products are easy to use and work well. As a company, Google also stands for education and creativity, shown by the science fairs and doodles contests they host”.
Here’s a totally irrelevant and entirely unrelated example of a YouTube video:
A percentage – a small one, but still a percentage – of the children asked about these brands replied that they weren’t even aware of Google, which is possibly my favourite thing about all of this.
How does music fit into this though? Well, music isn’t a brand, so didn’t come into the main coolness chart. Although Spotify made it into the top half of the coolness list (just). As did Bose and Beats By Dre, these apparently being the only three music-related brands anyone could think of.
A smaller group of kids – 400 of them – were asked what things, rather than brands, they thought were cool. Girls were significantly more likely to say that music was the coolest, with a whopping 13% saying that they like those funky sounds, while just 6% of boys reckoned music was the best thing. In fact, far more boys rated ‘other’ as cooler than music. Music was the girls’ second favourite though (behind ”clothes, fashion and beauty’), so that’s nice. For boys it was joint seventh.
However, musicians do dominate the list of coolest celebrities, with three of the top five being music makers – Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez and Chance The Rapper. The research also found that most teenagers would rather listen to music than make it themselves, which is presented as some kind of revelation, rather than how it has always been.
The acts most likely to make it onto a teen’s playlist are apparently: Twenty One Pilots, Drake, The Beatles, Panic At The Disco, Fall Out Boy, Beyonce and Coldplay.
In conclusion: Children are idiots.
