Gerry’s generation gap

Now Gerry Harvey reckons that the ‘generation gap’ could be about to make a comeback

Retail king Gerry Harvey knows a thing or two about social trends, he has made a BRW Rich 200 fortune from understanding the stuff that goes into aspirational households, the must-have personal technology, and the undying Australian quest for a bigger television.

Now Harvey reckons that the ‘generation gap’ could be about to make a comeback.

The generation gap is a long-dead 1960s and 1970s term that marked the collision between pre-war parents and their boomer offspring who started coming of age in the mid-1960s.

The social and political explosions of 1968 in the United States and across the university campuses of Europe were the high point of the clash, but the whiff of Molotov cocktails pervaded through every western household. My father, born in the early 30s, did long service at sea in the 1950s. He had left to Glenn Miller, and come back to the jarringly unfamiliar tones of Elvis Presley. Though the Beatles later mellowed his view of rock music, he never quite got it, or ever understood his son’s later obsessions with it.

As boomers became parents themselves in the permissive 1970s and 1980s, the divide and the term vanished, to be replaced by a period where boomer parents embarrassingly aped their offspring in music, clothes, liberal attitudes, and sometimes general waywardness.

Harvey pointed out to BRW last week that there was very little difference between himself at 70, and his son at 45, in the way they live, and the way they think. He and his own father, says Harvey, would never have been that close. But the rapid take-off of the kind of technology that Harvey sells, and the way that different generations use it, could reopen the gap.

He has two younger children of 17 and 20. He reckons that they would find it tough talking to a 35 year old. By the time that children presently of 8 to 10 years old get to their mid twenties, the current thirty-somethings will in turn be fifty-somethings and both groups might also find it hard to talk. By the time those being born now reach 20, a rapidly changing world may have pushed the gap out further, Harvey speculates, with older generations once again struggling to be relevant to the emerging young Turks.

“Is that possible?” he asks.

Quite possible. Marketing experts point to the continuous tribalisation that is now taking place in markets as we become less homogenous by ethnicity, lifestyle and once again by age. We are all about to get our own age-band television channels, it seems. Seven Network is planning a channel called 7mate, aimed at 16 to 49 year olds to re-run offbeat comedies and sci-fi and other horrors besides. I shall never watch, retreating to the soon-to-be-announced Silverback channel which will sport endless re-runs of Morse, Midsomer Murders, bowls and Brideshead Revisited. We have it already? The ABC, you say?

It will take a lot of Gerry’s TV screens to keep the peace in future households. Now there’s a clever old retailer.

BRW

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