Though there isn’t one single way to divide people into age cohorts for the purpose of citing behavioral and attitudinal commonalities among consumers within a defined time period, the most commonly referenced are the major categories of Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y.
I was born in 1967 – ah, yes, 40 years ago today – which puts me in the Generation X cohort of people born between 1965 and 1980. Many people point to author Douglas Coupland as having coined the moniker “GenX†in his book of the same title, but it was also the name of musician Billy Idol’s punk band in the early ‘80s. This is important to note because ours was a generation profoundly shaped by the launch of MTV and the proliferation of music videos.
Never before had there been such a powerful combination of sight and sound to tell us what to wear and do – even who to ‘be’ to be cool. The ‘beautiful people’ cluttered the screen on MTV, riding subways, dancing in the twilight, dressed in tuxedoes shooting (poison) arrows. It was all about fashion, and took our consumerism to the next level as, arguably for the first time, product placement took center stage.
Posted by: Colin Mangham