No one can miss the sharp uptrend in births following the end of World War II, when a generation that had been postponing marriage and childbirth got busy. A whole lot of kids were born in the years after 1945, and they grew up in an America that was experiencing a sudden and rapid economic expansion. We may all be tired of hearing about the Baby Boomers, but the Baby Boom was a genuine, and exceptional, event in American history, precipitated by and accompanied by cataclysmic historical events. But while these features of the cultural tsunami known as the Baby Boom are well known, what's less often remarked is how, for the Baby Boomers and those who marketed to them, generation became a key means of market segmentation. For the first time, a car was being sold, not just as the best form of transportation, but as the best for a particular age group - a group which apparently had needs in a car that their fathers didn't have, needs that they themselves may not have been aware of before reading that sly and flattering tagline.
Constructs are useful - there's no question about that.
All society proceeds on the basis of agreed-upon divisions of reality, from national borders to ZIP codes. But few constructs are useful to everyone equally, and for that reason very few constructs are simply self-generating. In the 1980s, as the Baby Boomers reached their prime earning and spending years, marketers discovered more and more ways to use their unique generational consciousness to create market segments. They turned to the pop-culture artifacts that had accompanied the Baby Boomers' adolescence, licensing everything from the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan. These artists became totems for footwear and flavored water less for their rebellious or prophetic character than for their ability to conjure up generational solidarity.