Embrace Who You Are

The march of the new is relentless, with new devices, new channels, and new forms of media arriving just about every day. At the same time, this causes a relentless hunger for content that has left us awash in nostalgia, from new shows like “Stranger Things” steeped in the Zeitgeist of the 1980s to our endless ability to stream old music, movies, and TV shows.

What genius, then, that the makers of Etch A Sketch would embrace this phenomenon, and given my own age — I’m squarely in the middle of Generation X — it’s no wonder it practically leaped off the shelf at me when I spied it during a recent trip to Target. It stirs memories of playing with this classic toy, trying in vain to draw perfect circles and hide the lines that connected one shape to the next. But it also speaks to our worry about all the time our kids spend in front of screens, and reminds us that we can still provide children with pure analog delights.

Etch A Sketch could try to reinvent itself for a digital age. Instead it has learned the most important marketing lesson of all: Embrace who you are.