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The Tanning of America

How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

The business marketing genius at the forefront of today's entertainment marketing revolution helps corporate America get hip to today's new consumer—the tan generation.

When Fortune 500 companies need to reenergize or reinvent a lagging brand, they call Steve Stoute. In addition to marrying cultural icons with blue-chip marketers, Stoute has helped identify and activate a new generation of consumers. He traces how the "tanning" phenomenon raised a generation of black, Hispanic, white, and Asian consumers who have the same "mental complexion"—one based on shared experiences and values rather than the increasingly irrelevant demographic boxes that have been used to a fault by corporate America. But there is a language gap that must be bridged to engage the most powerful market force in the history of commerce.

The Tanning of America provides the needed translation guide. Drawing from his company's case studies, as well as from extensive interviews with leading figures in multiple fields, Stoute presents an insider's view of how the transcendent power of popular culture is helping reinvigorate and revitalize the American dream.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 23, 2011
      Stoute, founder of a brand-imaging firm, offers an entertaining, instructive mix of business memoir, music history, and marketing tutorial. He argues that hip-hop blurred "cultural and demographic lines so permanently that it laid the foundation" for the transformation he calls "tanning," a process that would "alter the landscape of Americaâracially, socially, politically, and especially economically." He surveys the early development of hip-hop and the arrival of LL Cool J, "the hip-hop celebrity who gave the marketing world an early tutorial about the value of aligning their brand with the genre." Stoute then moves more fully into the world of commerce, where "advertisers were looking to use the hip-hop Midas touch" but had little understanding of "the consumer they were trying to reach." Stoute's entrepreneurship and expertise in rebranding (e.g., Ray-Ban, Reebok, Modell's) makes absorbing reading. For the uninitiated, this is a sold primer on the business of music; for music historians, it's a solid study of how "how urban culture came to influence the mainstream economy."

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  • English

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