Put up your hand if you have an X-Box at home? a Playstation? a Wii?
Or when handball was popular, who loved to play handball?
You’re probably wondering what this talk is going to be about today: it is going to be about “CRAZES”.
A Craze is a product, an idea, or a cultural movement, that becomes popular among a small group of people, then quickly becomes popular everywhere.
There are so many examples of CRAZES:
In the 1960s there were the crazes:
Being a hippie,
The Beatles,
Miniskirts.
In the 1970s there were crazes such as:
Disco Music,
Charlie's Angels.
In the 1980s there were many crazes, for example:
Rubik's Cube,
Break Dancing,
Pac-Man,
Nintendo,
Skateboarding,
Sony Walkmans, to name only a few.
In the 1990s, the crazes:
The Macarena
Tamagotchi
Beanies (caps/hats)
Computer games, caught world by storm.
And most recently, in the 2000’s (or the “noughties” as this decade is sometimes called), we have gone crazy over things like:
Scooters,
Rollerblades,
iPods,
DVD’s,
MP3 players,
Playstation,
X-Box,
Wii,
Blogging,
You Tube, and last but certainly not least,
Mobile Phones.
Some of these CRAZES were things OUR grandparents were excited about, and others were things OUR parents were enraptured by. Still others are things that now WE kids are feverishly obsessed with.
These crazes put pressure on our parents to buy and buy and buy, and spend their money on us, because we kids want all the latest things out, and we want it NOW!!
We kids are of a generation known as “Generation Z”. It is claimed that members of our generation are very active consumers with a high degree of influence over their parents’ purchasing decisions.
Now let’s think about it.
PUT YOUR HAND UP if you influence your parents on buying things??
I know my brother does….he’s good at it because every time we go shopping he whinges to Mum that he needs new pairs of shoes, clothes….bla bla bla…. And of course he gets it!!
Now...