Make Your Brand Matter

CHAPTER 3Focusing on the Modern Consumer

As a proud Generation Xer born and raised in the 1970s and 1980s, whose first experience with technology involved an Atari 2600 hooked up to a 12‐inch tube television, and who started programming in BASIC on a Commodore PET with an 8‐bit processor, 4k of available RAM, and a cassette recorder for program storage, it's entertaining to take this walk down memory lane and reflect on the many shifts that we've seen in brand interaction and engagement paradigms. Even with those humble technological beginnings, I've remained current with all the changes and have fully embraced them. As Phil Dunphy proudly declares in the Modern Family Season One pilot, “I'm a cool dad. That's my thang. I'm hip. I surf the web, I text. LOL, Laugh Out Loud, OMG, Oh My God, WTF, Why The Face.”¹

The reality is that I, and many of my Generation X peers, pride ourselves on being technologically fluent and fully up‐to‐speed on modern interaction technology, but we have the luxury of memory of life before the web, before the smartphone, and before streaming content that tempers our expectations with brands. The Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation before them have even lower digital expectations, and in fact there are those who continue to hold onto the old ways of working and interacting. They still go into the bank branch. They still pay with cash, or, potentially, with a credit card, and they prefer to go to the mall to complete their Christmas shopping. They ...