The Better Mousetrap

"Back in the day": Nostalgia Brands & the Retro Sell

 

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

 Leslie Poles Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)   

 

I’m told women very quickly forget the extreme pain of child birth. To ensure further procreation, the brain pulls a sniper-accurate insomnia trigger. Because Total Recall would mean a lot of One Child families. I suspect Nostalgia is the same kind of operator.  

I’m pretty convinced that nostalgia never paints an accurate picture. There’s hyperbole in the paint-mix (maybe that’s the “red”?). Even a little allegory; one’s past “made myth” (that could be the “purple”?). And voila, we’ve got ourselves “Rose”.   

So The Past is a myth, a sleight-of-hand deception, truly a foreign land as Hartley suggests, because it never actually existed. Not the way we remember it. The Past conjures all the magic and mystique of a travel brochure destination, without a handy time-machine to disprove the allure and expose the truth.  

Where I’m going with this is this.  

If brand-building is an exercise in the Creation of Appeal through Association & Evocation, then Nostalgia can be one helluva compatible and curvy bed-fellow.  

Of course “Nostalgia” isn’t a gambit that can be played by every brand, or even every brand old enough to be credibly able to play it. But at the right moment, given the right context, nostalgia can be a great brand-building device. 

 

Nostalgia Pays its Way  

Nostalgia is all about context. Then... compared to Now. When “Now” represents tough times, we hark back all the more to times that were happier.

Lego is one of the few brands that has shown itself to be near on “recession proof”. In fact, Lego has become a beneficiary of a recessionary climate. UK profits soar for Lego Lego's latest financials show a storming 12 months, with significant double digit growth for UK sales for the fifth consecutive year. Lego also increased its global market share to 4.8%. (Source: Toy News, March 4, 2010)  

Nostalgia has provided a kind of Kevlar for Lego’s bottom line, because purchase provides a kind of comfort blanket for consumers. When times are uncertain, folks revert to brands they feel certain of. Buying Lego for your child is buying something you know, that you understand and remember. It’s the happy glow of a warm-safe-place at a time when financially-speaking, so many feel like they’re sleeping on a ledge.

 

“The public demand for nostalgic toys and brands they know and trust has meant we’ve fared well.”

Marko Ilincic, MD, Lego UK & Ireland  

 

Past Myths Made Real  

 

 

Lego, Hovis, Heinz Baked Beans, Fairy Liquid, these are brands that “channel” nostalgia. They vibrate with a set of values, homespun, more innocent, pure, of simpler times, that “Time-Worm” that Golden Age of Never right into the hand of the consumer every time they pull a loaf or can or bar from the shelf. Hovis: As good today as it’s always been.    

That’s a little slug of Feel Good right there with every buy. Agency CDP knew this back in 1974 when they asked Ridley Scott to direct a TVC that proclaimed, “As good for you today as it’s always been”.  

Here was Dvorák's "New World" Symphony setting the tone for sepia-infused, uncurbed nostalgic enthusiasm, a bread-delivery boy taking on steep-cobbled inclines and free-wheeling home to the ultimate reward of a Hovis loaf containing “many times more wheat germ than ordinary bread”.

  

   

Hovis “Bike Ride” (1974). Agency: CDP. Director: Ridley Scott  

 

Twenty-four years later, in 2008, agency Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy simply reinforced the message. A nicely ambitious and sweeping piece of filmmaking, “Go on lad” chronicled the last 122 years of British History in 122 seconds, tracking the movement of a young boy through time and space from a start point of 1886. 

   

 

Hovis: The last 122 years (2008). Agency: Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy. Director: Ringan Ledwidge   

 

It’s claimed the execution was subsequently responsible for a 13% increase in annual sales of Hovis.  

Virgin Atlantic doesn’t go back 122 years, but it doesn’t have to. A quarter-century is more than enough equity to get in on the act. Their “25 years. Still red Hot” TVC is a gloriously knowing nod to a decade that possessed close-to-zero self-awareness.  

Strutting through Heathrow airport for the first time on “June 22nd, 1984”, we witness a red-costumed coterie of air stewardesses paying leg-service to Robert Palmer, accompanying a square-jawed Virgin pilot who may once have been the Marlborough Man. The 90 second swaggering set-piece is set to the soundtrack, Relax, courtesy of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The whole experience is like hoovering a pure, uncut line of Absolute 80’s direct from Tony Montana’s personal supply.  

 

  

Virgin Atlantic – “25 years - Still Red Hot” (2009). Agency: RKCR/Y&R  

 

But what if you’re a marketeer who doesn’t have the production or media budget to commission new TV ads that affectionately parody the past? The resurrection and re-airing of Classic TV ads from yester-year has also been a trend of recent years. The Milky Bar Kid, the Bisto Family, the Cadbury Caramel Bunny, ads and images you last saw 25 years ago are being re-beamed into people’s living rooms. With every intention, the Brand Builders are mining deep, using the living room as the entry-point, but hoping to travel much further into the murky memories of childhood, dredging up sugar-and-gravy associations that live in our “I remember when’s”.

There is an opposing professional school of thought amongst some of my peers that this is no more than “lazy marketing”, but I think it runs considerably deeper than that.  

 

The Right Kind of Old  

Lego, Hovis, Heinz Baked Beans, Fairy Liquid: these are exemplar brands of the Nostalgic Tradition, Genuine Household Names, with masses of latent good-will & implicit “feel good”. New ad campaigns with re-enforced or updated messaging can top them up, add a few fresh litres to the image tank, reinvigorate them to degree, and perhaps cause some re-appraisal (as we see with Hovis)... but fundamentally these brands don’t need to have something new to say. They stand for all they’ve become.  

Nostalgia brands have stood the test of time, are proven, made credible by the fact they’re still in the game, WITHOUT becoming outmoded, out-dated, superseded.  

But here’s the “but”. Working on a Nostalgia brand doesn’t mean you can always break early for lunch, kick back, sit on your hands, rest on your laurels, hold on to your market share. You can still negligently kill a Nostalgia brand by turning it into the Wrong Kind of Old.  

I once worked on a household cleaning brand whose longevity as a business is triple-digit. As a company you’d never really appreciate their roll call of achievements unless you looked it up, or happened to work for them, and what stood out when I dug into it is how this manufacturer had, in their own way, made their mark, decade after decade, helping in some small way to move us on in the Game of Progress. Here was a 100 year old manufacturer of power tools who also happened to be inducted into the Space Foundations Hall of Fame for its contributions to NASA’s Gemini and Apollo missions. Its contribution to wonky shelves the DIY world over remains unsung.    

I was working on an assignment to launch a new product line. New product lines are all about having something new to say. At least, you hope they have something new to say. You hope there’s credible scope for the product’s truth and articulating the benefit to people, spelling out The Why They Should Believe.

Boiling it right down, the product line’s “at its heart” proposition (I’m abridging here) was... “Smart, quick-cleaning products that make your life easier” They may have used a few more words, but short or long, as a proposition goes, this is water-tight in a Boulder Dam kind of way. Because the consumer need, for “quick-cleaning products that make life easier”, is timeless. Because housework is boring, is right up there with death and taxes in its disagreeable inevitability, so any piece of Product-Smarts that takes some pain away and does the job in less time is always going to be a better mousetrap for people.    

The tightrope balance of heritage and innovation was the crux of it, how to ensure we could play to Origin Story & Provenance, and still really dial-up New-ness. It was a case of New, born of Old. Where Old is also a really good thing. The Watch-Out for every Nostalgia brand is how you guard against becoming a Yesterday Brand, how you Stay Relevant and fend off someone else banging a drum that they’ve just hit town with the next best thing since sliced bread. It’s a balancing act, but possible to get it right and have it both ways, to play both ends of the see-saw.  

 

The Nostalgia Brand Balancing Act

 

For Nivea, 2011 marked “100 years of skincare”. 100 years is an achievement in anyone’s brand book, and rightly a very real reason to celebrate and slap on some self-congratulations. But these kinds of announcements are never without hazards. Every time you remind people you’ve been around for 100 years, you remind them how old you are. Upside: stood the test of time. Downside: surely superseded by something New & Improved? Nivea’s solution was to partner with Barbadian R&B recording artist Rihanna (b. 1988). 

 

 

   

Understandably, Nivea doesn’t want to be a brand that ages with its aging users – because the ultimate outcome is a dwindling-to-zero one. Rihanna represents a whole other, whole younger fan base, and that could spell new Nivea users for generations to come. But how congruous and compatible is this partnership? Nivea also doesn’t want to alienate its biggest fan base, its core loyal users, who are over 40 and unlikely to be all that impressed with a 23 years old’s maverick musicality, overt sexuality, or chequered private life. Where’s the identification for them? How does a 43 year old relate to the new face of a brand that has been “her brand” for the last 15 years? With hope, Nivea’s core users are sufficiently loyal, and the association will help contemporise the brand’s image, which is obviously the hope.  

 

Retro Originals, for those who weren’t originally there  

In Ogilvy on Advertising (1983), the man himself defines “a brand” as...

 

“The intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it's advertised.”

 

A very fair-enough roll-call of attributes from David O, and they all surely make a contribution to the Intangible Sum. The hope indeed is that, in the finest Gestaltian tradition, they all weigh-in and add to a greater whole, with each attribute being something you can dial-up or down, depending on the weather. Of Ogilvy’s roll-call of attributes, for me, “its history” is a point of a standout. (Of course, it was for you too, because I put it in bold.) Its “history” is a gentle nod to this subject of nostalgia, and furthermore to the “retro” sell. Nostalgia and Retro are part of the same bag of tricks, stem from the same bundle of meanings, from this desire we have for Things Past. 

 

Nostalgia – noun

A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.

Source: dictionary.com 

 

So by definition, “nostalgia” is something you CANNOT sell to The Kids, because they weren’t there First-Time round. 

Nostalgia is a luxury and indulgence of the old enough; a consequence of being Old Enough to have accumulated some rose-tinted memories, to have built a sufficient bank of Good Times as to feel the pang of melancholic loss, a realization that not All Times are Good Times.  

“Retro” on the other hand is a two-gambit sell. It lets the Old Enough relive it, and it breathes new life into an old idea for everyone else.  

A brand’s “History Attribute” may be a point of “Feel Good” (nostalgia), or very simply by alternative, “Feel Cool” (retro). This latter example very commonly pays rent in the heartland of the fashion world.  

 

Vans, Converse, Nike, Adidas: brands where “retro” is either a facet of their identities, or a core component. 

  

Converse, founded in 1908, is a brand sum comprising of a 100+ year history, and collaborations with ’20s basketball player Chuck Taylor and ‘30s Canadian badminton champion Jack Purcell. British fashion label Fred Perry lives on precisely the same street as Converse; a place of vintage style, tradition, and authenticity born of personal sporting accomplishment.  

 

The fredperry.com landing page: “I’ve had a love affair with the Fred Perry label since I was 14...”  

 

Adidas’ “Originals collection” sits neatly under the Adidas masterbrand as a stand-alone vertical, pitching themselves as “vintage clothing, retro shoes and urban wear that blend timeless 70s and 80s designs with sports styles.” Those consumers targeted by Adidas Originals will certainly not be old enough to have purchased these ranges when they originally hit the shelves. 

 

The Kingdom  

“Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the colour of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks.”

 Julio Cortazar, writer  

 

I don’t know for sure, because I never met him to ask, but I take Cortazar’s reference to “the kingdom” to mean one’s Past, to mean the memories we have and hold dear, good and bad, that we carry with us. We are the sum of our experiences, but specifically the sum of how we remember those experiences.

From memory, we make The Past real, even if it’s not actually how the facts originally played out. Why let the facts get in the way of a good memory? Imagination. Re-invention. Re-imagining. It’s what we human beings do. And quite often, created in our image, it’s what our brands do too.

SP.

Teen Alienation is So Analogue

 

 

When Roger Ebert, the film critic, reviewed the teen comedy Heather’s (1989), he opened with:

 

"I approach Heathers as a traveller in an unknown country, one who does not speak the language or know the customs and can judge the natives only by taking them at their word.

The movie is a morbid comedy about peer pressure in high school, about teenage suicide and about the deadliness of cliques that not only exclude but also maim and kill.

Life was simpler when I was in high school."

 

Roger Ebert, born 1942, was aged 47 at the time of his review, and the only clear thing to him about Heather’s was that it was a movie that made him feel old. Exposed to one beat of the movie’s black heart and he found it impossible to relate.

A client, a West Coast movie studio, once asked me to give a talk on teen audiences, and how they’ve changed over the last 20 years. Let’s take 1991, they suggested, and compare it with 2011.

Of course, when you get asked, “What’s changed in the last 20 years?”, you know up-front the answer is going to be, “A lot”. Because a lot should have changed, because we are talking 20 years.

 

Then... when the last 20 years rewinds us to Year Zero of the Internet Revolution, the scope of social change that follows is likely to stretch out towards some crazily far and wide horizons.

 

Then... within that, air-drop Teens, mostly Digital Natives, sometimes labelled Millennials, both badges meaning folk who arrived into a world where the Digital Revolution wasn’t a revolution. Rather, just life. Just their “every day”.

 

Long-short, for my presentation to the movie studio, I wasn’t struggling for material.

The Teen Trope

In global cinema admissions, teenagers represent a good two thirds of all tickets sold. The marketing minds coming up with how to sell movies to Teens are in their 30s and 40’s, and their very fair front-of-mind fear is that they’re just like Roger Ebert; travellers in an unknown country, out of touch and step with Digital Teen Tribes populated by some born as recently as 1998.

Now Teens are a fascinating audience. They’re trying on identities, toying and trialling personas. Personality-wise, The Teen is a work-in-progress; they’re far from fully-formed, and by way of compensation, in their “early-days” search for Identity (and Belonging), they often affiliate with strongly-flavoured cliques.

 

 

RANDY

You can't win. You know that, don't you? It doesn't matter if you whip us, you'll still be where you were before, at the bottom. And we'll still be the lucky ones at the top with all the breaks. It doesn't matter. Greasers will still be Greasers and Socs will still be Socs. It doesn't matter.

The Outsiders (1983)

 

Greaser, Soc, Mod, Rocker, Punk, Prep, irrespective of specific Clique Club, there’s a groove-worn cliché that runs through all...

 

The Teen: estranged, isolated, alienated, On-the-Outside, even to or beyond the point of social delinquency.

 

This at least, is the well-trodden “Teen Trope”.

 

The Past was Easy to Paint Black 

 

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

 

Whether Jimmy Dean depicting American Youth in moral freefall, or Billy Idol giving voice to Rebel Yell in 1983, “Rebellious” has been a well-flexed prefix to “Youth”.

 

Teens, almost by definition, used to be at arms-length to, well, pretty much anyone who wasn’t a Teen. They were at arms-length to Parents. To Society. To Social Mores. To Conventions. To a grown-up sense of conformity and “doing things the way things should be done”. The Teen was intimately in touch with The Roger Ebert Sensation, of feeling like a stranger in a foreign land, only where they viewed from the other side of the looking glass, into “The Land of Adult”.

 

In consequence, through the decades, Pop Culture has reflected the Teen Condition. Take 90’s movies like Slacker and Pump up the Volume, Clerks and Office Space. These are commentaries that reflect their time, where disaffection was close at hand.

 

 

MARK HUNTER/HARD HARRY

“You see, there's nothing to do anymore. Everything decent’s been done. All the great themes have been used up. Turned into theme parks. So I don't really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally, like, exhausted decade where there's nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to.”

Pump up the Volume (1990)

 

I mean, really? Come on? That bad? A little hard to say where the hyperbole ends and the legitimacy starts. While today, the Counter Culture vibe feels really quite retro, it’s quite imaginable that there were more than a few Hard Harry’s lost in the early 90’s, sincerely struggling to find cheer and originality.

 

And from the 90’s, it’s easy enough to follow the thread further back.

 

The Slacker was of course a throw-forward from the 80’s, a slothful, sloping, baggy-shirted archetype born of Generation X parentage.

 

Where Coupland populised the phrase in his ‘91 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the Gen X tag had been making the rounds through 60 years prior.

 

"Generation X" has always signified a group of young people, seemingly without identity, who face an uncertain, ill-defined (and perhaps hostile) future. Subsequent appearances of the term in the mid-1960s and mid-1970s narrowed the referent for "Generation X" from Capa's global generation to specific sets of primarily white, male, working class British youth sub-cultures, from the spiffy mods  and their rivals the rockers,   to the more overtly negationist punk  subculture."

John Ulrich, author

 

“Without identity... facing an uncertain, ill-defined, hostile future.”

 

Pretty bleak stuff - but not all bad if you happened to be an Ad Guy in the 80’s, sitting on a brief to position a certain computer manufacturer as a challenger brand. Even Dystopia can have a silver-lining; can make for rich fruity pickings.

 

Consider Apple’s entry into the Best Ad of All Time category, “1984”.

 

On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."

“1984”, by Apple Computers. Dir: Ridley Scott. Agency: Chiat/Day (1984)

 

Back in 1984, Apple struck a chord because on some level to many people (and not just Teens), 1984 did feel as if Orwell’s vision had subtly come good, that there was something ever-so-slightly-controlling in the air. To some small degree, perhaps everyone’s Inner Jimmy or Billy identified with the hot blonde runner hurling a sledgehammer at a bleached blue face of State Control?

 

Time trek back to the Here & Now and “1984” is still a great ad, but it does feel like it’s one from the vaults, a comment on a different time and place, conceived and calling out to a very different set of hearts and minds.

 

Goths Denied their Isolated Dystopia

 

Courtesy of Easy-Access Social Media, I believe the traditional Teen Trope has had a reboot, is now grooving to a rather different beat.  

 

In a Digital Age of Facebook and Twitter and Tuenti and a list that rolls on and on, an “Always On” society can reach out, connect, find voice, understanding, even kinship.

 

You like polishing your collection of monkey skulls and storing them in your sock drawer? By conventional tastes, you’re really very creepy, but little doubt there’s an online chat room out there for you, that may even have suggestion on the different types of polish to use.

 

Park monkey skull-polishers, broaden it out to a more palatable sub-group like Teenagers, or a Teen Sub-Group therein, say “Goths”, and the same principle applies.

 

 

“The Goth subculture remains a visual shortcut through which young persons of a certain damp emotional climate can broadcast to the other members of their tribe who they are. Goth is a look that simultaneously expresses and cures its own sense of alienation.”

The New York Yimes, Sep 17, 2008

 

Teen Alienation is a whole heap easier to side-step these digital days.

 

Twenty years ago, being "the only Goth in the village" (or whatever other teen-clique psyche-attire you were trying on for size) would typically lead to introspective and/or outward cries of, "No one understands me", "I'm all alone in the world", "No one can imagine what it's like to be me!"

 

Bemoaning would be part-cure, as would listening to a lot of The Cure.

 

Boys Don’t Cry (1980), The Cure

 

Social Media has largely vaccinated against this particular strand of estrangement. Now, "the only Goth in the village" can log-on and link to a "Global Goth Community" of the Like-Minded and Similarly Attired. "No one understands me", replaced with check-out my blog, "My Life as a Goth".

 

Without getting too carried away, too overly cheerful and utopian, I think we might just be standing on the doorstep of something Really Rather Good.

 

There’s a New Idealism in play. Not a movement that’s sweepingly political or grandly idealistic. More so, the kind of idealism that’s immediately accessible and in limitless supply to all teens: the Ideal of Self Expression and Micro-Group Identification.

 

Rather than Raging against the Machine, Teenage Time is taken up with digital articulation and social outreach.

 

From Disaffected to Affected

 

Disaffected has always to me sounded a bit too phonetically close to “disinfected”, uncharitably implying a significant number of teenagers need a good wash. Teen hygiene aside, the notion of disaffection is starting to feel rather dated.

 

Teenagers used to partly define themselves based upon “what they were not” and what they didn’t want. Now they (like everyone else), can focus instead “on a positive”, on definition of self, based on wants, on “what they wish to be”, and the instantly accessible groups to which they wish to affiliate.

 

To this end, I’m not convinced teenagers, in particular Western Teenagers, are Outsiders any more. They’re Insiders. They’re able to reach out and sound off to the thin-sliced social set of their choosing.

 

Society has gone multi-micro, meaning there’s someone there for everyone, leaving nothing left to feel on the outside of. And most crucially, this makes it harder to be “against” a society or system.

 

Put another way, this is bigger than just making Goth’s feel happy.

 

Teens are “Avatar-ing” themselves all over the internet, are re-articulating self-reliance as self-invention. “Being Teen” is becoming the pluralisation of self, of creating multiple and carefully brushed digital personas, heroic within vivid and highly documented “Life Factions” We’re seeing Teen Affectation in overdrive.

 

“Teens” was once an optional short-hand for “Anti-establishment”, because The Establishment didn't speak for them, wasn't them. Curiously, The Establishment once stood for something long-standing, something old and established.

 

"Established" doesn't take so long these days. Potentially, can be uploaded, made real, gain following, over a weekend.

 

The digital age can instigate change overnight, build new “virtual” edifices that are as real as any forms made of bricks-and-mortar. No shopper has ever physically walked through the door of Amazon, but we visit Amazon all the time. Amazon is just as trusted and real as Waterstones or Dillons or Foyles, and given square-foot overheads, is likely to be around a lot longer.

 

No longer in the same way, nor same number, do Teens still want to tear down the place and rebel yell at the walls of conformity, at The System, as created time in memoriam, inherited and upheld by each generation of "grown-ups".

 

We don't need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

Another Brick in the Wall Part 2,

Pink Floyd (1979)

 

Contrast Pink Floyd’s take on institutional learning with Spinebreakers, Penguin's endeavour to embrace the Digital Age, involve Teens, and show how publishing can be a future-proofed business.

 

Launched in September 2007, Spinebreakers.co.uk was the UK’s first online book community for teenagers. Its editorial team is run by Teens, aged 13 through 18, and it makes an open invitation to Teens everywhere, to join in, contribute, to say something.

 

As they put it...

 

 

The truth is, if you have a voice, you don’t find the same compunction to yell (the way Billy Idol once did). If you have the means to channel your anger, you never boil over. Perhaps “Digital media” partly stifles the Rebel Yell because so many now get to yell so freely, as often as they want, as fast as their fingers can cover a keyboard? Now there are outlets like Facebook, perhaps fewer Teens feel compelled to feel like Che Guevara?

 

 

The Kids Have Taken Over the Place

 

To complement our Open-Access Age, these are currently Open-Minded Times. Gen X... became Gen Y... became Gen Why Not? (Maybe I’ve engineered that one a bit, but I think it holds.)

 

The prevailing mood today isn’t an exhausted one. Today, twenty-something’s can become billionaires. Teens have Role Model proof points that encourage their self-belief.

 

Mark Zuckerberg

I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try - but there's no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention - you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.

The Social Network (2010)

 

Forbes pegged Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune at £6.7bn in 2011, placing him 14^th in their list of the 400 richest Americans.   

 

The Final Word from John Hughes

 

In 1991, the Internet was effectively “switched on”, made available for unrestricted commercial use. The number of computers that connected across “The Net” numbered (wait for it) 1 million.

 

By 2020, “mobile internet” is trended to top 10 billion, meaning that the internet is there for everyone. The “PC”, the Personal Computer, has in reality become The Phone In Our Pocket.

 

Coca Cola's fabled Vision-Mission “to have a Coke within arm's reach of everyone on the planet”, is likely to always be just that, a fable. For analogue brands, the world’s just too damn big. For digital brands, for social media brands, they can fulfil Coca Cola’s vision without breaking sweat. And what this really means is that anyone can “feel” at arm’s reach of everyone else. And where does that then leave Teen Alienation?

 

Potentially, obsolete, is where.

 

So times have changed, but then, they always will. It’s what they do.

 

Have Teens changed that radically over the last 20 years? Of course not. What we’re witnessing is simply New Ways of meeting Old (read: Fundamental) Needs. This is all about Change within the Frame.

 

Being a Teen will always be about reconciling inner conflicts born of self-defining and self-discovery. Of wanting to stand out and fit in. Of needing to rebel against something or someone in order to slowly accept who you might be and might become.

 

In spite of the massive cultural and technological swells that have figured over the last 20 years, a teen’s Rites of Passage remains set to a fixed bearing. Filmmaker John Hughes knew well of the journey of Self-Esteem & Belonging that all Teens have to sail.  

 

Brian Johnson

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong...but we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain... and an athlete...and a basket case... a princess... and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

The Breakfast Club (1985)

 

Whether you left High School 30 years ago, 20, or you’re still walking through the door, the bottom line remains the bottom line. It is... and always will be...about the air punch.

 

Only these days, there are more ways to do it.

SP.