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

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About Brent Green
This blog is about Baby Boomers and our impact on business, society, and culture, today and in the future. Here I explore many themes relevant to those of us on a thoughtful journey to reinvent the future of aging. I am a consultant and author of six books, including "Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers: Perceptions, Principles, Practices, Predictions." I present workshops and give keynote speeches about the intersection of the Boomer generation, business, aging, and societal transformations. My company, Brent Green & Associates, Inc., is an internationally award-winning firm specializing in building brands and forming successful commercial relationships with Boomers through the unique power of generational marketing. Marketing to Boomers I welcome your comments and questions here. This blog is a continuing conversation that began in June 2005, and I'll appreciate hearing from you.

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February 01, 2012

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.

Posted at 10:41 AM in Advertising, Film, Marketing, Media, Sociology, Sports, Television | Permalink

Tags: Cuspers, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Generation Jones, Honda CR-V, Jonesers, Leading-Edge Baby Boomers, Matthew Broderick, St. Elmo's Fire, Super Bowl 46, The Breakfast Club, Trailing-Edge Boomers, WarGames

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