What Baby Boom Marketing Sounded Like & How It Changed
By Michael Drew - Sep 02 , 2010
Strauss and Howe’s 1991 book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, tallies the Baby Boom generation (made up of people born between 1943 and 1960) at 79 million people, the largest generation in U.S. history. The potential buying power of a group this size wasn’t lost on marketers, evidenced as early as a Newsweek article that ran August 9, 1948: Population: Babies Mean Business. Here are some of the article’s points:
- Women’s Wear Daily estimated that people spent $225,000,000 on clothing for infants and children in 1939. By 1944 that amount almost doubled to $420,000,000. In 1946 it reached $700,000,000; and in 1947 it climbed even higher.
- The Chicago Sun-Times reported that annual sales of prepared baby food rose from 400,000 cases in 1934 to 2,700,000 cases in 1941 to 15,000,000 cases in 1947.
- The sale of recordings for children rose from 2,000,000 in 1941 to over 30,000,000. Some half-dozen new companies entered the children’s-record field in the first six months of 1947 alone.
- Despite a shortage of raw materials, the number of toy companies doubled between 1942 and 1947.
- Production of juvenile furniture in 1947 was 54% above 1946, which in turn was 39% above 1944.
- Production of children’s books also swelled. The three major magazines for the very young—Child Life, Jack and Jill, and Children’s Activities—had combined circulations of 1,300,000 in 1947.
From the day boomers were born they became the apple of every marketer’s eye. That trend would continue for the next 60 years.
By 1953 companies were beginning to sense a shift in society. The civic-minded attitude of the veteran-laden G.I. generation was being replaced by a much more self-absorbed one. General Motors responded by releasing the Corvette, a sexy new sports car with only two seats. Two years later Warner Brothers produced Rebel Without a Cause about a troubled youth who bucks authority and marches to the beat of his own drum. Do your own thing, baby. Right on.
As Boomers came of age over the next three decades, reflections of their idealistic and even pretentious nature were everywhere:
- 1969: Dr. Thomas Harris releases I’m OK – You’re OK, a self-help book designed to solve one’s problems through “Transactional Analysis.”
- 1978: The Village People release their second album, Macho Man, which includes the title song, along with “I Am What I Am,” “Just a Gigolo” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody.”
- 1983: Dashingly smooth solo spy James Bond stars in Octopussy, which raked in $187 million at the box office.
Products, and the marketing that went into them, revolved around hype and pretense. As marketing guru Roy. H. Williams stated in his June 7, 2004 Monday Morning Memo:
“Most branding campaigns are costumes worn by advertisers to the Media Masquerade Ball. They were the hot ticket during the pretentious Baby Boomer years when blue ribbons went to those wearing the best costumes…”
“…in the past, advertisers had only to claim to stand for some misty-eyed claptrap and idealistic Boomers would choose the product - “Coke wants to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, and furnish it with love, grow apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtledoves… I believe in world peace, too, so I’ll buy Coke instead of Pepsi.”
Today’s civic-minded generation regurgitates the ideal-driven pretense gobbled up by Boomers. Market yourself as “amazing, astounding and spectacular!” and they hear “blah, blah, blah.” If you want to stay relevant with the 72 million in the Millennial generation:
1. Pull them towards you with true perspectives and values rather than pushing your products and services with hype.
2. Identify potential challenges to your message and address them directly. Be transparent.
3. Start a conversation: create a blog.
