Marketing street culture; bringing hip-hop style to the mainstream

American Demographics, Nov, 1996 by Marc Spiegler

Many of the hottest trends in teenage music, language, and fashion start in America's inner cities, then quickly spread to suburbs. Targeting urban teens has put some companies on the map with the larger mainstream market. But companies need an education in hip-hop culture to avoid costly mistakes.

The Scene: Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, a bastion of the white East Coast establishment. A teenaged boy saunters down the street, his gait and attitude embodying adolescent rebellion. Baggy jeans sag atop over-designed sneakers, gold hoops adorn both ears, and a baseball cap shields his eyes. On his chest, a Tommy Hilfiger shirt sports the designer's distinctive pairing of blue, red, and white rectangles.

Four years ago, this outfit would have been unimaginable to this cool teen; only his clean-cut, country-club peers sported Hilfiger clothes. What linked the previously preppy Hilfiger to jeans so low-slung they seem to defy gravity? To a large extent, the answer lies 200 miles southwest, in the oversized personage of Brooklyn's Biggie Smalls, an admitted ex-drug dealer turned rapper.

Over the past few years, Smalls and other hip-hop stars have become a crucial part of Hilfiger's open attempt to tap into the urban youth market. In exchange for giving artists free wardrobes, Hilfiger found its name mentioned in both the rhyming verses of rap songs and their "shout-out" lyrics, in which rap artists chant out thanks to friends and sponsors for their support.

For Tommy Hilfiger and other brands, the result is de facto product placement. The September 1996 issue of Rolling Stone magazine featured the rap group The Fugees, with the men prominently sporting the Tommy Hilfiger logo. In February 1996, Hilfiger even used a pair of rap stars as runway models: horror-core rapper Method Man and muscular bad-boy Treach of Naughty by Nature.

Threatened by Hilfiger in a market he had profited from but never embraced, it hardly seems coincidental that Ralph Lauren recently signed black male super-model Tyson to an exclusive contract. Even the patrician perfumier Estee Lauder recently jumped on the Hilfiger bandwagon, launching a new cross-promotion series with the clothing company. The name of one of Lauder's new perfumes says it all. "Tommy Girl" plays on both Tommy Hilfiger's name and the seminal New York hip-hop record label Tommy Boy. Hilfiger also launched a clothing line for teenaged girls in fall 1996, projected by the company to gross $100 million in its first year on retail racks.

On the surface, it seems Hilfiger and others are courting a market too small and poor to matter. The majority of true hip-hoppers live in inner cities, although not all urban youths embrace the culture. About 5 million U.S. teens aged 15 to 19 lived in central cities in 1994, or 28 percent of all people that age. Inner-city blacks aged 15 to 19 are an even smaller group. At 1.4 million, they are only 8 percent of all teens. They also have significantly lower incomes than their white suburban counterparts. The numbers of 20-to-24-year-olds and black 20-to-24-year-olds in central cities are also small, at 6.5 million and 1.6 million, respectively.

So why are companies pitching products to the hip-hop crowd? Because for most of the 1990s, hordes of suburban kids--both black and white--have followed inner-city idols' in adopting everything from music to clothing to language. The most prominent examples are in evidence at suburban shopping malls across the country: licensed sports apparel, baseball caps, oversized jeans, and gangster rap music.

Scoring a hit with inner-city youths can make a product hot with the much larger and affluent white suburban market. But to take advantage of this phenomenon, you have to dig into how hip-hop culture spreads from housing projects to rural environs, understand why hip-hop is so attractive to suburban whites, and discern the process by which hip-hoppers embrace products.

HIP HOP HITS THE MAINSTREAM

In its early years, MTV drew jeers for being too "white," for shying away even from vanilla-flavored black pop stars such as Michael Jackson. Yet most pop-culture watchers agree that the cable channel's launching "Yo! MTV Raps" in 1992 was the pivotal event in the spread of hip-hop culture. Running in a prime after-school spot, and initially hosted by graffiti artist and rapper Fab Five Freddy, the show beamed two daily hours of inner-city attitude at adolescent eyeballs in even the most remote Iowa corn country.

"There's no question--'Yo! MTV Raps' was the window into that world for Middle America," says Janine Misdom of Sputnik, a Manhattan-based firm that tracks youth trends for clients such as Levi-Strauss, Reebok, and Pepsi. Other video-oriented media soon followed. Within a few years, an all-day viewer-controlled channel called The Box supplied a steady stream of harder-edged hip-hop to any kid within the viewing area of a major metropolis. In 1993, about a year after "Yo! MTV Raps" hit cable, more than six in ten teens aged 12 to 19 rated hip-hop music as "in," according to Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU) of Northbrook, Illinois.