In the caveman days, advertising must have been simple. If you
needed to promote a product, you just went to the cave TV station
and aired your message to caves across the country.
That was The Flintstones; this is now. We have labels for
specific age groups, like "Mature Generations," because
nobody knows what else to call the World War II soldiers and nurses
who gave birth to the baby boomers who begat Genera-tion X, who in
turn begat Generation Y. As we all know, if we're advertising a
brokerage firm, we aren't going to advertise on a Saved By the
Bell repeat. But we might on a repeat of The Monkees, a
favorite of Generation Jones.
Yes, that's right: Meet Generation Jones. Actually, you
already have. Many of you may already be members of the club. You
just never knew it, just as Generation Xers had no identity (or is
it lack of identity?) until Douglas Coupland wrote a book with a
title that gave the younger masses a moniker.
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Generation Jones, if one is to accept this premise, represents
males and females born between 1954 and 1965, an era that, we all
thought, belonged to the last of the baby boomers and the first of
the Gen Xers. But historians, demographers, politicians and
entrepreneurs may need to start rethinking things.
The Jones concept was created by sociologist Jonathan Pontell,
who will be 42 in June and always felt he was only trapped inside a
boomer's body. "I can remember first hearing the words
'baby boom generation' as a high school student,"
muses Pontell, "and the whole class burst out laughing when
the teacher told us we were baby boomers. It was so obvious we
weren't. That was in the back of my head all those years. I
wasn't spending sleepless nights obsessing over the fact that
I'd been mislabeled, but in the back of my head, I never
identified with the boom."
All those years, instead, Pontell firmed up his education and
life experiences. He graduated from Cambridge University, becoming
a lawyer who never really practiced law. He traveled, returned to
the states and started a successful national distribution business;
later, he drifted from country to country, his longest stay in
Prague.
Meanwhile, the question of generational identity continued to
nag at him. Says Pontell, "In the early '90s, when the
whole Generation X-babble-looza kicked in, I realized immediately
that I wasn't part of that either."
And then, a few years ago, Pontell was in the middle of a
six-month stay in India when his radio played a song that included
part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream"
speech. Listening to those words promptly "brought tears to my
eyes," says Pontell, who spent much of that night thinking
about why he had been so affected. "I realized there was
something special about being a child of the '60s--not a
'flower child,' someone well into his teens and 20s and who
was changing the world, but a child formed by those changes. That
story had never been told."
It will be told this month in a new book by Pontell called, of
course, Generation Jones (Vanguard Press), and his ideas can
be studied at www.generationjones.com.
Pontell spent several years writing the book and researching it,
finessing what years his generation encompassed and what it should
be called. He did the latter by coming up with 650 names, whittling
it down to 20 and asking 800 people to choose from the list.
"Generation Jones was overwhelmingly the favorite," he
says.
And a favorite of the media's to boot. Newspapers and news
cable stations (i.e., Fox, MSNBC) have run stories about the
emergence of Generation Jones, and Pontell, a regular publicity
machine, has collected the approval and applause of like-aged
celebrities around the United States. Drew Carey, Wesley Snipes and
Patrick Swayze have all promoted the idea.
"Jonathan Pontell is right. There's this group of us
who grew up on Twister and The Brady Bunch, and the baby
boomers were before that," says Rosie O'Donnell in
Pontell's press releases, "and I feel totally disconnected
from the Gen X crowd."
Speaking of The Brady Bunch, Maureen McCormick gushes in
the publicity material, "Marcia Brady finally has a
home . . . I know now what I am. I'm a
Joneser!"
But do we really need to keep up with the Joneses? Although she
believes Joneses are a subset of boomers, Ann A. Fishman, president
of Generational Targeted Marketing Corp. in New Orleans, admits
that Pontell has done his homework and agrees that entrepreneurs
should be refining their messages depending on the age group.
"If you know the characteristics of what history produced
in a certain generation, you really are a step ahead of everybody
else," says Fishman, whose clients have included such
powerhouses as Reader's Digest. "It does
make a difference if you grew up during a depression, or a time of
influence. It does make a difference if you grew up during war or
during peace. It does make a difference if you grew up with
stay-at-home mothers or with working mothers. These things really
cause differences in how consumers react to a message."
"This generation is at the center of, and is the largest
segment of, that marketing mantra, 25 to 54," says Pontell,
who now runs The Jones Group, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit
organization dedicated to correcting the misnaming of a generation.
Pontell delivers seminars and workshops on the subject and consults
for businesses like Avant-Guide travel books and
EducationPlanet.
Com. Even if Pontell is biased toward his own cause, he may be onto
something. Fifty-three million Americans fit into the Jones
Generation.
"We're really at a place of influence, with a huge
amount of disposable income," says Pontell. "It's an
important group for entrepreneurs to be
looking at."
So we recommend you take the caveman approach to advertising
only if you're including an actual nod of nostalgia for The
Flintstones. That was a Generation Jones favorite, too.
Geoff Williams is a frequent contributer to
Entrepreneur. He confesses to being a Gen Xer but
says,"Hey, some of my best friends are Generations
Jonesers."
Contact Source
Generational-Targeted Marketing Corp.,
(504) 866-7624, aaf4gtm@aol.com