Boomers

Ferris Bueller, Honda CR-V, the Super Bowl and Trailing-Edge Baby Boomers (a.k.a. Jonesers)

For those of you now past age 47 who were born, reached maturity, and lived in the sociological wake of Leading-Edge Baby Boomers (b. 1946 to 1955), you may have felt slightly disenfranchised, culturally speaking. Maybe being shunned has even stirred deeper feelings of sibling rivalry.

If you were born between 1956 and 1964, coming of age in the 1980’s, you may be harboring unfathomable yearning feelings (a.k.a. jonesing), wondering when your birth cohort would ever receive its due—being noticed and catered to by major marketers and brands.

Well, jones no more.

Just in time for all the Super Bowl 46 brouhaha, Honda has launched a new TV ad squarely targeting devotees of culturally significant movies such as WarGames, The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire.

However, this time the brand-spanking new CR-V is the escape wagon for Matthew Broderick, reprising his legendary role as Ferris Bueller (as in Ferris Bueller's Day Off).

In this docudrama, Ferris has become Matthew, who calls his demanding boss to feign the flu so he can recapture a work day for himself, cruising around Southern California in a 2012 Honda CR-V (a bit pedestrian next to the 1961 Ferrari GT California featured in the movie—but still a practical set of yuppie wheels).

And so we follow Matthew reprising his bewildered character: being impulsive, zany and inane as he escapes the drudgery of his existence as an overworked and undervalued A-List Hollywood actor.

If you came of age in the 80’s and thought of Ferris and his reprobate costars as your kind of antiauthoritarian characters—not hippies but hip—then this ninety-second Super Bowl ad is just for you. Honda is aiming the newest rendition of its most successful SUV product ever built (with annual sales exceeding 200,000 units per year) directly at you: the Trailing-Edge Boomers, Cuspers, and/or Generation Jonesers.

Congratulations for finally achieving full status as “the demo,” no longer standing in the long shadow of your older brothers and sisters.

Your day has come, and it’s a day off.

A New Digital Art Form Redefines Generational Marketing through Boomer Nostalgia

In a previous post, I argued in favor of Generational Marketing — an approach to brand development that connects products and services to generational nostalgia, merging past with present.

This approach to building brand identity and product awareness has critics. Some believe nostalgia borrows too much attention away from a product: we get caught up in an ad’s nostalgic moments and then ignore or forget the product being promoted. Some insist that nostalgia is focused on the past, and Boomers today are looking ahead: past experiences divert thinking to bygone life chapters that have been read, closed and preferentially forgotten.

My arguments about the efficacy of Generational Marketing in this blog and in my most recent book, Generation Reinvention, are based on social science research and sociological theory. This line of reasoning appeals to critical thinking but possibly does not drive my points home with emotional clarity. In this post I am sharing a few visceral experiences of the past. Consider an advertisement for Coca Cola:

 

For movie fans among you, does the setting appear vaguely familiar? This portrayal of a nighttime cityscape has not yet happened but rather it is a glimpse into the future: November 2019, to be exact. But wait! The image actually became part of cultural history in 1982 through a Stanley Kubrick movie entitled Blade Runner. And in May 2011 a striking manifestation of this memorable movie moment then emerged through a powerful new art form.

So, is this cinematic moment an image of the past, present or future? Could the power of generationally shared nostalgia give consumers another memorable brand impression, increasing awareness of and consideration for Coca Cola?

Artist Gustaf Mantel has created an extraordinary series of animated GIFs that brings new resonance and emotional endurance to cultural history. Called cinemagraphs, these subtle animations merge the powerful selectivity of still photography with video to portray “something more than a photo but less than a video.”

Now, let me ask you if this copy seems familiar: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” If this statement does not strike a responsive chord, perhaps Mantel's GIF will transport you back to an eerie moment 31 years ago:

 

What if a contemporary marketer for a brand of blue jeans integrated this memorable image of Jack Nicholson in The Shining with a product message aimed at Boomers — something about the iconic comfort of chic casual blue jeans? Or what might a tennis ball marketer do with such a moving and memorable vignette?

Generational nostalgia can be captured in many ways, especially when marketers merge the newest technologies with shared experiences and an art form that gives new meaning to hard-wired memories.

If a marketer wants to stir up anti-authoritarian feelings in a generation — the sense of being outcast for superficial reasons such as looking old in a youth-oriented society — the marketer might resurrect dialogue from another classic movie: “Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.”

And then the marketer shares this visual reminder of what it felt like to be dismissed during youth for arbitrary reasons:

 

In a direct mail campaign my team created for Orange Glo International and its OxiClean brand, we transformed a photographic image with nostalgic appeal into a brochure cover — tapping a memory buried in the psyche of almost any Boomer who in childhood took a lingering bubble bath while playing with a favorite toy:

 

With cinemagraphic technology, we could have expressed our idea in another, perhaps even more memorable way: 

 

“When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.” The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Some viewers looking at these moving images will see merely photographs enhanced by motion-capture technology, perhaps experiencing some charming interpretations of bygone times. I see something more. I see potential for product marketers —particularly those employing online media channels — to reach the hearts and minds of a generation with nostalgic moments reinterpreted for contemporary times and products.

This may not have been the primary intention of artist Gustaf Mantel, but his new art form has thought worthy implications for marketers trying to create brand impressions in a much cluttered online world:

 

Avatar: A Mythic Movie for Baby Boomers

“You’re not in Kansas anymore, ladies and gentlemen,” cautions Col. Miles Quaritch, a sinewy, pugnacious antagonist in James Cameron’s instantly classic science fiction movie, Avatar.

Most American Boomers recall a powerful line from the first mega-movie to capture them as children: an eternal story of fanciful travel and even alien humanoids, a movie masterpiece called Wizard of Oz. Spoken by child actress Judy Garland, the original quote rings through the ages: “Toto, I have the feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Many glowing film reviews are being written about Cameron’s newest cinematic achievement. My filter for this movie is the same as the context of this blog, my books and speeches. I watched Avatar to understand how Boomer history, sociology and culture pervade the story, arguably the finest achievement of a director whose birthright is the Boomer generation.

What can Boomers discover and rediscover by simply investing 163 minutes watching this film?

First, Avatar is a blockbuster movie, wide and deep, thus encouraging multiple viewings to comprehend and appreciate tens of thousands of directorial nuances built into a technological feat of 3-D animation.

Epic movie events populate Boomer history. Many dotingly recall blockbuster films from their youth. Cinematic extravaganzas from the 1950s often showcased prehistoric monsters portrayed by men wearing latex rubber suits (and silly by today’s standards).

Perhaps the most famous of those blockbuster monster movies was Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, released in 1956 as an American adaptation of the original Japanese version. Filmed just a decade after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla was an allegory for irrevocable consequences that radioactive weapons could have on our planet.

Without ambiguity or subtlety, Avatar is a pro-environmental, antiwar movie and allegory.

Cameron’s awe-inspiring world of Pandora—its lush beauty, alien landscapes and ironically comprehensible flora and fauna—invites viewers to yearn for places of unspoiled beauty, tapping into deeply felt human needs for connection with the natural world. Mechanized assaults by humans on Pandora’s raw loveliness become more wretched in juxtaposition.

Clearly the director/writer of this movie has experienced and internalized antiwar messages of the Vietnam War era and even the bitter taste of environmental desecration symbolized by Love Canal. Visibly he has captured his revulsion for offensive war through a film that hauntingly intersects with two terrestrial wars today.

By probing the mystical, spiritual life of the giant blue Na’vi, Avatar champions a tribal narrative, recalling an Age of Aquarius when leading-edge Boomers became more sensitive to alternative lifestyles of Native Americans and Hindu mystics. As Boomers reached maturity, passage into independence for many also incorporated reverence for nature and unspoiled places, thus popularizing a renaissance in rural living and backpacking excursions into wilderness. Tribal ideals included exploration of new realms of spirituality and esoteric rituals designed to foster community while embracing inter-species diversity and racial acceptance.

It’s obvious to me that James Cameron is a Baby Boomer, not just because he was born in 1954 but because of his values. We can reasonably assume that one wellspring for his story was many movie experiences he must have had growing up. Like many of his generation, he learned to cheer for the underdog through epic stories such as Star Wars and Rocky. We may surmise that Cameron also must have felt deep indignation when beholding exploitation of land, native peoples, and wild animals as he watched Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves.

Through his portrayal of the Na’vi people on the planet Pandora, Cameron reveals cinematic influences that have led us to a more post-racial era. The director may have learned to identify more with minorities though movies that successfully amplified the social carcinoma of racism: great films such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, In the Heat of the Night, and more recently, Mississippi Burning.

Many movie critics have bestowed actress Sigourney Weaver with accolades for her performance in this movie. Once again, this Boomer performer, who turned 60 this year, has portrayed a character with a strong feminist bearing: a protagonist determined to prevail over mean-spirited forces. Weaver’s Grace Augustine recalls other iconic female heroes (and Cameron characters) such as Terminator’s Sarah Conner (portrayed by Linda Hamilton) and Alien’s Ellen Ripley (also portrayed by Weaver).

Portraying aggressive and racist Col. Quaritch, actor Stephen Lang, born in 1952, reprises the historically endowed role of a gung-ho military antagonist. He reminded me of other complicated and angry men reenacting the Vietnam War such as Tom Berenger, who portrayed a harsh and hardcore staff sergeant in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (a fellow Boomer director).

Writing for The Denver Post, movie critic Lisa Kennedy observed that Avatar “conjures Boomer memories of Saturday afternoons spent in the company of Ray Harryhausen’s hydras, dinosaurs and cyclops.” This pioneering special effects genius has obviously influenced James Cameron with storytelling possibilities of stop-motion animation, now updated to achieve truly otherworldly movie experiences.

Avatar also conjures Boomer recollections of epic movies, heroic storylines, racial injustice, xenophobia, environmental desecration, feminism, antiwar sentiments, historical exploitation of Native Americans, and yearning to return to nature, to live in peace more communally.

This movie reminds us of when we were young and becoming more complicated members of a tribe, not just a generation.