The latest Pew report was still fresh on my mind. Why I wondered is technology use and especially social media involvement so heavily skewed to an under-35 demographic? Then my daydreaming was shattered as I opened the door at the phone store to replace my shattered i-phone.
These places I remembered always made me nervous: sleek design, futuristic lighting and no clocks. Like a casino it seemed that creating a universe detached from our regular cosmos was carefully planned—all the better to conduct commerce and allow customers to drift into their own endless daydreams of accessories, devices, apps and digital personalization.
The place was busy for a weekday morning and with one exception, I pegged myself as the oldest on the premises. I was helped by a nice, quiet and baby-faced 20-something. My needs were simple. I needed the data from the shattered device transferred onto its replacement—the latter having appeared at my doorstop seemingly as quickly as the hand flub that busted the original phone. The rep took both to the mysterious backroom, said it would be a few minutes and asked me to look at their accessory special of the week: a mini-boom box that was about the same size as the audio cassettes that gave birth to the original boom box some 30 years ago.
I waited, listened and was impressed with the audio quality. I also noted with delicious irony the music featured during my half hour of wait, commerce and general technology education. The device was in heavy rotation with tunes that easily were older than everyone who worked there and most who came as customers. Consider: Lynyrd Skynyrd in the days before Free Bird fell and prematurely took Ronnie Van Zandt, the Allmans when peach-eating, Bob Seeger while night-moving and the charging rock of Bad Company—perhaps the hottest rock band during America’s Bicentennial not named Frampton or Fleetwood.
Originally pressed onto media that is at least three generations obsolete the tunes created a background vibe that seemed pleasing to all in attendance. But to the middle-aged among us it also stoked recollections of “album” rock and stadium concerts. I wondered once more what motivation married this cutting edge audio with 1970s rock? The benefits of what is new was being illustrated with help from what is old—a most unorthodox marketing tactic!
So with Pew data, pie-slice boom boxes and the rock of my youth all mentally mixed I completed my commerce bemused and confused. The new and the old had combined to create an instructive experience—not everything about the arc of technologies was to be linear and clean. And, what’s the harm in that?
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John Durante is marketing services director for WordWrite Communications.
