The Conquest of Kool

Abstract

This chapter takes up a case study that provides a window onto the shifting cultural significance of jazz during the 1980s, a decade that saw both the emergence of neoclassical jazz in the music industry and the consolidation of new strategies of market segmentation in the advertising industry. The present project examines internal corporate correspondence at the Brown and Williamson tobacco firm to trace the evolving understanding of jazz in the company’s formulation of its “Kool Music” campaign for its Kool brand of menthol cigarettes in the early 1980s. Brown and Williamson’s correspondence during this period foregrounds not only the reasoning behind its embrace of jazz as a symbolic property from the outset of the campaign but also why it would eventually come to abandon it. Brown and Williamson’s “Kool Music” campaign highlights the very different uses to which jazz was put in an earlier moment of targeted marketing. Brown and Williamson struggled to identify the music’s affective resonances, its appeal to specific race and class demographics, and its potential usage as a marketing tool. In this context, the internal debates surrounding jazz at Brown and Williamson help to make sense of the music’s later enlistment as a signifier of upscale consumerism.